“That’s outstanding, folks, we really appreciate that, we really do. Now we’d like to go ahead and ask you to form a single-file line starting with the lady with the ponytail. You’ll be noticing a van backing toward you from the west, which will be your escort.”
Lilly hears the whine of a large panel van running in reverse, closing in on them, coming through the fog bank of carbon monoxide to the west. Despite the fact that every molecule of her being is now screaming for her to get out of here, run, now, and under no circumstances get into that fucking van, she knows deep down that this is exactly how they’re going to get their children back, so she assumes the lead position by showing her hands, nodding, and walking toward the sound of the engine.
“I can’t fucking believe we’re doing this.” Jinx speaks under her breath as she turns and puts her hands on top of her head, falling in line behind Lilly. The walkers have closed the distance to thirty yards.
“Take it easy, trust me, we’ll be okay, just don’t panic.”
“These people are fucking savages. We’re just going to surrender?”
Norma speaks up, her hands raised and showing sweat spots on the fabric under her arms. “How do we know they ain’t gonna just kill us like the rest of them poor folks? What good is that gonna do?”
Tommy stands next to Norma, nodding nervously but saying nothing.
“Okay, enough!” Lilly clenches her jaw, hands raised, eyes wet as she whispers. “Everybody—trust me. They could have smoked us a million times already. Just trust me and follow my lead, let me do the talking.”
By this point, the van has emerged from the fog. It pulls up in front of Lilly, skidding to a stop on the bare ground. A few of the walkers have strayed a little too close for comfort. The van’s passenger door swings open, and a heavyset man in camouflage leans out with an HK machine pistol. The blasts come in a succession of metallic snapping noises, the tops of walker heads bursting in plumes of pink mist that shimmer and vanish in the spotlight beams.
Then the amplified voice returns, sounding to Lilly like the folksy voice of an airline pilot inviting passengers to feel free to move about the cabin.
“And folks, please remember, there’s no reason to be alarmed, and there’s no reason for any harm to come to any of you, especially if you’re all willing to cooperate. All we ask is that you go ahead and get inside the van.”
The van’s rear doors squeak open and a younger, skinnier man is standing inside the cargo bay waiting for them. Dressed in olive-drab army fatigues, a headset, and a Mohawk hairdo, he grins convivially with gold-capped teeth like a concierge in a fleabag hotel.
For just an instant, Lilly hesitates. The herd closes in. The wind bullwhips trash and the stench of dead flesh across the light-struck haze. Lilly takes a deep breath, looks at the others, and then gives a reassuring nod.
She climbs on board.
The others follow—one at a time, each one reluctantly breathing in a girding breath before crossing the threshold of the cargo bay. The door closes behind them with a bang as the vehicle pulls away to parts unknown.
PART 3
Nightshade
The stuff of nightmares is their plain bread. They butter it with pain. They set their clocks by deathwatch beetles, and thrive the centuries.
—Ray Bradbury
TEN
Georgia State Road 314 wends its way through the darkness of the outskirts, past the empty husks of latchkey communities now sitting in mothballs, the dollhouse cul-de-sacs of Fayetteville and Kenwood littered with wreckage and sun-faded personal effects strewn across the intersections like so much useless spindrift. Visible in the flash of passing headlights, bullet holes and blood smears pock the exteriors of every other building, as common now as fallen leaves. Bryce chooses the less traveled two-lane over Interstate 41 for many reasons. The main thoroughfares are all but impassable nowadays due to overgrowth and the decaying wreckage clogging every turn, every exit ramp, every culvert and overpass. Plus, there’s a certain discretion in returning to town via one of the less traveled roads. These days, the tribes watch each other, and when Bryce has subjects on board, he wants to keep as low a profile as possible.
“You ever wonder about it?” Daniels’s voice seems to come from miles away, distorted by the night winds through the Humvee’s vent. Bryce barely registers it as he steers the behemoth past the ruins that used to be Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In the darkness, the once great transportation hub now lies in heaps of burned debris and boarded terminals festering in the void of night. The runways crawl with the shadowy silhouettes of roamers. The central tower has collapsed into itself, and the scorched carcasses of aircraft scatter the scarred tarmacs as if an angry giant grew weary of playing with them. This is the back door into Atlanta, the service entrance. Bryce once again glances at the side mirror at the caravan—both twin and single headlamps—following him into the city.
Right now he can see the double high-beams of the large, battered panel van driven by a former grunt and munitions expert, Sonny Hopkins, in the middle of the pack. Bryce imagines that hard-ass chick from Woodbury in the back of that cargo bay at this very moment, plotting her countermeasures, stewing in her rage, biding her time. The civilians in Afghanistan were like that—quiet, unobtrusive, savage in their vendetta against outsiders policing their land.
Bryce throws a glance at Daniels. “What was that?”
“I said, do you ever think about it?”
“Think about what?”
Slumped in the shotgun seat, the smoke from his hand-rolled skunk-weed curling up and vanishing in the green glow of the dash lights, the younger man stares out the window at the passing nightscape. “Hold on a second, hold that thought.” He digs in a pocket and finds another EpiPen. The device is a small, glassine tube auto-loaded with a premeasured dose of the mood enhancer known on the street as Nightshade. Most of the former soldiers in Bryce’s crew became accustomed to using auto-injectors back in the Iraq War to counteract Saddam’s chemical agents. Now Daniels presses the tip against a bleeding heart tattoo on his bicep and blasts himself with another ten milligrams of courage. He drops the spent pen on the floor mat and settles back, exhaling the supercharged breath that follows a dose of the stuff. For a moment, he smells ammonia and his brain spins like the tumblers on a slot machine. Finally he says, “What I mean is, do you ever, like, think about what we’re doing?”
Bryce keeps the vehicle at a steady forty-five miles an hour. With the added impact of the makeshift cow catcher mounted to the front grill—a conglomeration of concertina wire, rebar, and a section from an old bulldozer scoop—the speed is fast enough to mow down any stray walkers who wander across the beams of their headlights. “What do you mean, ‘what we’re doing’? You talking about this? The smash and grabs?”
The younger man shrugs. “Yeah, exactly. I mean, do you ever wonder about it?”
“What do you mean, whether it’s right or wrong?”
Another shrug. “Yeah … I guess.”
“There’s no such thing anymore.”
Daniels looks at the commander. “What are you saying? There’s no such thing as right or wrong?”
“Not anymore.” Bryce smiles to himself. “It’s an anachronism nowadays … like fresh milk, Wi-Fi, and the sports page.”
The younger man sits back, rubs his face, thinks about it, feels the drug working on his central nervous system, flushing his inhibitions and fears like toilet water swirling waste down a drain. “I don’t know. I guess you’re right. It’s just the…”
Bryce lets the silence lie there for a moment. “The kids we took? The fact that we found kids this time?”
A shrug. “I don’t know. Don’t listen to me, I’m a fucking pogue.”
“Go ahead, Daniels. Say what you want to say. Speak your piece.”
“I just remember that second tour, we were actually making a difference. At least it seemed like we were. Building clinics and shit. There was that school
we built for the folks in Helmand Province, remember?”
Now it’s Bryce’s turn to shrug. “That was a different world.”
In the dim green light of the dash, Daniels looks like he’s still processing something. “I guess you’re right.” He sighs. “I’m sure Doc Nalls knows what he’s doing.”
“Let’s fucking hope so.”
They drive in silence for a few minutes. Bryce notices the horizon to the east beginning to go from inky black to ashy gray, the dawn just behind it. He looks at his watch. It’s almost five. They’ll be back home before six. “How’s that ’Shade doing? You feeling better?”
Daniels nods and smiles. “Feeling better all the time.”
“You still want to have that deep discussion about right and wrong?”
Daniels looks at Bryce. In the green glow, the younger man’s toothy grin looks cadaverous. “Fuck right and wrong.”
* * *
Long after dawn breaks over the top of Atlanta’s desiccated skyline, the deep canyons between the buildings stay shrouded in shadow. Bryce keeps his lights on as he leads the convoy past mountains of burning wreckage and around pockets of walkers so thick the creatures move elbow to elbow down alleys and walkways. The heart of the city has gone from bad to worse over the last year. The air chokes with death-scent, the smell so thick it seems to cling to the low clouds scudded across the sky. The narrow side streets teem with the undead, most of the buildings lost to the walkers. Many of the ground-level entrances have been breached and now hang open and blowing with trash and the dead shuffling aimlessly, shambling in and out of vestibules as though moving on muscle memory, shopping for some bargain they will never find. Bryce hates this town.
He turns right on Highland and leads the caravan toward headquarters when the crackle of Daniels’s radio fills the Humvee’s interior.
“Yo! Daniels, you copy?” The voice squawks from the tinny speaker. “It’s Hopkins … over?”
The younger man grabs the walkie-talkie and thumbs the button. “Copy that. Go ahead, Hopkins.”
“It’s probably nothing, but it’s something I thought you and Bryce might want to know.”
“Copy that, go on.”
Through the speaker: “It’s really quiet back there. Has been for miles.”
Daniels looks at Bryce and thumbs the switch. “Soames is back there with them, right?”
“Yeah but his headset went down, lost contact around Carsonville.”
“It’ll be fine, Hopkins, don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t know. They were all yelling and shit, arguing with Soames, and then … nothing. Quiet as fucking church mice. I don’t trust these douche bags. They ain’t going gently into that good night, if you catch my meaning.”
Bryce sees the corner of Highland and Parkway Drive in the early rays of the sun a block away. In the ribbons of morning fog, the sunbeams slant through the haze and illuminate a ragged contingent of dead milling about the leprous pavement of the intersection. An overturned MARTA bus, as scarred and scorched as the petrified remains of a dinosaur, lies in the background against cement barriers enclosing the former medical center parking lot. Bryce looks at Daniels. “Gimme the bitch box,” he says.
Daniels hands it over. Bryce thumbs the Send button. “Hopkins, just take a deep breath and don’t do anything stupid … we’re almost home.” Bryce tosses the radio on the seat and lets out an exasperated sigh. “Goddamn, I’ll be glad when this one is over.”
He yanks the wheel at Highland, mows down a couple of moving corpses, and then drives down the ramp into the shadows of the parking complex.
* * *
Lilly feels the undercarriage cobble over speed bumps. She braces herself against the corrugated metal wall and tries to think straight. Her cheek stings from getting slapped, her spine throbbing with agony. The cargo bay has a single dome light, hectic with mosquitoes, shining down on a filthy iron floor littered with candy wrappers, packing straps, and bloodstains. The air smells of urine and mold. Spent shell casings and used EpiPens roll around the cargo bay with each turn, each shift in gravity. And now, Lilly presumes that the vehicle is booming down a ramp into some underground garage or warehouse, the g-forces tugging Lilly and the others forward as they descend at a forty-five-degree angle. Her wrists burning from the cable ties shackling her hands behind her back, her flesh slimy with sweat, her ass aching from the rough ride into town, she tries to take steadying breaths. Her brain swims with panic. In the dimly lit, windowless chamber, she can see the inevitable taking shape.
Tommy Dupree, also hogtied, sits on the opposite side of the enclosure, his feverish gaze locked on Jinx in the rear corner. Norma also has her eyes glued to Jinx. Even their captor, the emaciated redneck with the Mohawk—currently crouching against the front firewall with his AR-15 between his knees—watches Jinx now with the intense curiosity and wide eyes of a little boy contemplating a new kid at school. Lilly feels the air vibrating with latent violence, a crackling, prickling tableau that she now realizes she can do nothing to stop.
“Is there a problem?” Mohawk chews gum furiously as he regards the woman. “Is this like the silent treatment I’m getting now?”
Offering no response, Jinx meets the redneck’s gaze with tremendous calm. Her slender, lean body is folded like a praying mantis in the same corner into which Mohawk shoved her almost an hour ago.
The first thirty minutes of the journey, Jinx had sat there, hands tied behind her back, patiently working the stainless-steel throwing blade that she had hidden inside the lining of her leather vest into her bound hands. Lilly had been the first to see what Jinx was doing. Masking the delicate business of transferring the knife from the hem of the garment into the palm of her right hand, Jinx had launched into a series of high-pitched insults and threats directed toward Mohawk specifically and Bryce’s entire unit in general. Lilly had happily joined in. When the others realized what was going on, they also started whining about being taken captive against their wills and treated like chattel, and who did these fucking people think they were? The argument had escalated. Mohawk started screaming back at them and finally got up, lunged toward Lilly, and slapped her.
The slap had occurred about midway through the journey—right around the time Bryce had been circling Hartsfield—and the shock of it had stricken everybody silent. At this point, Jinx had successfully gotten the knife’s handle into her right hand and had commenced sawing the blade’s edge against the cable tie binding her hands. The next thirty minutes had been spent gently yet steadily sawing, sawing, sawing, while everybody stared awkwardly at the grime-spotted floor. The silence had driven the redneck to distraction.
Now he rises up to his full height in the narrow chamber, the body odor and cordite smells radiating off him, the plumage of his orange Mohawk practically brushing the ceiling. The Nightshade in his system fizzes behind his eyes. “I don’t think you understand how fair we’re being with you guys, we could have just as easily taken you out back there. Why the attitude?”
Jinx looks down, almost serene in her Zen state, her cobra-calm before the storm. “I don’t have a clue as to what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“What did you just say to me?” The gangly redneck takes a step closer and raises the assault rifle’s muzzle. He glares down at Jinx. The van shudders for a moment, turning a tight corner in some unseen subterranean parking complex. The redneck staggers, almost loses his balance. He glowers. “Can you please answer me? I don’t hear so good. What the fuck did you just say to me?”
Jinx looks up at him. “I said I don’t have a fucking clue as to what you’re babbling about.” She proffers an icy smile. “But maybe that’s your thing—all babble and no bite. Maybe you’re one of those guys, talks a lot to cover up the fact his dick is so tiny.”
The air pressure inside the van seems to suddenly contract, the silence broken only by the faint vibrations and muffled squeal of the tires as the van follows the caravan around tight turns. Mohawk st
ares at Jinx for a moment, utterly dumbfounded by this brazen woman with the shorn scalp and innumerable tattoos. In fact, for the longest moment, the man just stares, as though the very existence of this insolent, snotty Amazon does not compute.
At last, the man named Soames shrugs. He shows his stained teeth, and he lowers the weapon, and he chuckles as though getting the joke for the first time. The van jerks again as it comes to a halt. Voices echo outside, bouncing around the walls of some cavernous parking level. Mohawk doesn’t seem to notice. His grin remains. “I get it, really, I do, I get where you’re coming from with your—”
The speed with which Jinx rises up on her knees and drives the tip of that oval blade into the redneck’s ear makes Lilly jump. The man convulses backward, his eyes rolling back in his skull, his hands frozen ineffectually around the stock of the assault rifle. Jinx lets go of the blade. The man continues staggering backward, the knife sticking halfway out his auditory canal, until he slams into the opposite wall next to Lilly. Blood fountains down from his head as he slides to the floor like a sulking child.
He dies sitting down, drenched in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, as the rear door bolts rattle suddenly across the enclosure. The sudden noise makes all heads jerk toward the rear of the van. Each captive—including Lilly—stares, paralyzed with indecision. They have mere seconds to launch whatever counterattack they have left in them. In three … two … one …
* * *
In that terrible moment before the van’s rear doors squeal open, many things transpire in that reeking chamber—many of these things unspoken, communicated in quick gestures among the captives—starting with Jinx going for Mohawk’s assault rifle. She wrenches it out of the dead man’s palsied hands, which have frozen around the weapon’s stock. Then she pulls the throwing blade out of the man’s ear canal. It makes a sick, wet, smooching noise as it comes out, spilling another pint of fluid onto the floor.
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