The four men and one woman all turn and charge toward the barricade as Lilly reaches up and starts honking the air horn—the harsh bleating noise drawing every last biter in the vicinity toward the noise—and finally Lilly turns and runs off as the smoldering rag ignites the diesel fumes and then sparks the contents of the tanks.
Lilly covers about twenty-five yards—nearly reaching the burning wall—when the fuel reservoir explodes. The blast is preceded by a quick and silent flash of magnesium-bright light like a photographer’s strobe, making a match-head sound, and then the thing erupts.
The remaining biters are liquefied in the blast, the sonic boom like Vulcan’s hammer shattering the entire town, rattling windows for at least three blocks. The shock wave rams into Lilly and lifts her off her feet, sending her careening through the gap in the burning fence. She lands only a few feet away from the point at which the Sterns now gape at the spectacle from behind the water tower.
A black mushroom cloud the consistency of coal dust curls and rises into the sky over the mangled truck, about 60 percent of the frame and superstructure now reduced to scorched wreckage.
The silence that follows is almost as shocking as the explosion. Lilly rolls onto her back and stares at the empty sky, her head spinning, her ears ringing, her mouth coppery-tasting from the split lip opening back up, the small of her back wrenched in the concussion. The other members of her team come out from behind flaming debris and stand staring at her for a moment, as if knocked senseless by the final act of their counterassault.
Nobody says anything for the longest moment as the flames crackle around them. The sun is high in the sky now, the day warming up. At last Barbara Stern steps out from behind the water tower and casually walks over to where Lilly still lies, catching her breath.
Barbara stares down at her and lets out a long, anguished breath, and then manages a weary smile. Lilly smiles back at her—thankful to see a rational face—and the two women communicate volumes to each other without saying a word. Finally, Barbara Stern takes a deep breath, narrows her eyes at Lilly, and murmurs a single word.
“Show-off.”
* * *
They can’t relax—even for the briefest of moments—because the town is vulnerable. They’ve used up most of the ammunition, and the wall continues burning, throwing sparks, catching other structures. Plus, the pandemonium has almost certainly drawn more walkers out of the adjacent woods.
Lilly takes the reins and starts addressing the issue of the fire. She places her able-bodied men—Matthew, Ben, Speed, Hap, and David Stern—along the breach to guard against further walker attacks with the meager amount of ammunition they have left. Then she enlists the healthiest of the seniors and children to form a bucket brigade along the railroad tracks, using the stagnant well water from behind the courthouse.
They assail the fires with surprising efficiency, considering the varying skills and physical prowess of the weaker citizens now lugging buckets of foul-smelling water and tanks of CO2 across the south edge of the town. Nobody questions Lilly’s authority as she gently but firmly shouts orders from the roof of a semitrailer. People are too shell-shocked and jittery to argue with her.
Besides, most of the surviving Woodbury citizens still expect the Governor to return. Everything will be okay when he shows up. It might be mass chaos now, but when Philip Blake comes back, things will most certainly settle down and return to normal.
By dusk that evening, Lilly finally manages to secure the town.
The fires have all been extinguished, the bodies removed, the barricades repaired, the wounded taken to the infirmary, the alleys cleared of any lurkers, and the leftover provisions and ammunition inventoried. Exhausted, sore, and drained, Lilly makes an announcement in the town square. Everybody should take a quick break, tend to the wounded, replenish themselves, and then meet in the community room in the courthouse in an hour. They all need to have a little talk.
Little does anybody know, Lilly has a bombshell to drop and she needs to do it as gently as possible.
TWENTY-ONE
The entire population of Woodbury—a town that once upon a time was known for being the largest railroad hub in west central Georgia and was referred to in promotional literature and water tower insignias as “A Peach of a Place”—now gathers in the damp, fusty-smelling, cluttered community room in the rear of the modest little courthouse building.
The total number of souls still inhabiting the village—not including the two men currently patrolling the walls outside (Matthew and Speed) or the man presently occupied by some unknown task down in the infirmary (Bob Stookey)—amounts to a grand total of twenty-five: six women, fourteen men, and five children under the age of twelve. These twenty-five people now take their places around the scarred parquet floor on folding chairs, each of them facing the front of the room, theater-style, waiting for the single speaker on the program that night to begin her presentation.
Lilly paces along the cracked, bullet-riddled front wall, where the shredded remains of the state and national flags hang by threads on dented metal standards like totems of a long-lost civilization. Since the plague broke out nearly two years ago, men have lived and died in this room. Unspoken threats have been made, contracts have been sealed, and regimes have changed in the most violent of fashions.
Before speaking, Lilly measures her words silently, her face damp with flop-sweat. She has changed into clean clothes, a colorful orchid bandanna now battened around her neck. Her paddock boots click on the dusty tile as she paces. She has one Ruger MK II in a new holster on her hip. The wind rattles the high dormers, and the squeak of metal chairs settles, the hushed, expectant whispers fading into silence.
Everybody waits in the stillness for Lilly to say what she has to say.
She knows she has to just come out and say it, so she takes a deep breath, turns to the group, and tells them the truth. She tells them everything.
* * *
Bob Stookey trundles down the dark, deserted sidewalk with his sticky, bloodstained biohazard container under his arm, turning the corner at Main Street and Jones Mill Road, when he sees the generators on the courthouse lawn twenty yards across the square. The squat little five-horsepower engines vibrate and puff with exhaust, working busily, making the windows of the annex glow softly with warm yellow light.
The sight of the entire town gathered inside those windows gives Bob pause, and he lingers on the edge of the square for a moment, watching the reactions of his fellow citizens to Lilly’s news. Bob knows what happened, knows about Austin and all the others who perished, and he knows what she has most likely just dropped in the laps of these poor people. Late this afternoon, Bob spoke briefly with Lilly, shared her grief, and told her that he would support her in whatever she has planned for this place. He didn’t tell her about the Governor’s last request, however, nor did he show her the sole occupant of that second-floor apartment at the end of Main Street.
Now Bob stands alone with his box full of entrails, staring through the proscenium of windows into the radiant light of the community room.
He sees Lilly nodding at the folks, and he sees some of the townspeople raising their hands, speaking up, asking imponderable questions, their faces furrowed with worry. But Bob also sees something right then that makes him furrow his own deeply lined brow with bemusement, maybe even a little dismay. From this distance, hiding behind a skeletal poplar tree with his gruesome chum wafting its stench all around him, he can see some of the faces displaying expressions of … what? Hope? Humanity?
Bob’s mother, Delores, a former navy nurse in the Korean War, had a word for what Bob is seeing right now through those grimy windowpanes on the weathered, world-weary faces as they patiently listen to Lilly make her case for the future of their little motley hamlet. The word is “grace.”
Even in the worst situations, Bobby, Delores Stookey used to tell him … in the midst of death and suffering and, yeah, even evil … people can find grace. God made us this w
ay, Bobby, don’t you see? God made us in His image. Don’t you ever forget that, honey. People can find grace under the rocks of misery, if they have to.
Bob Stookey watches the faces in the community room, most of them eagerly listening as Lilly Caul explains the road forward. From the expression on her face—the way she holds herself, the way she almost imperceptibly squares her shoulders toward her audience despite her battered body and soul, her exhaustion, and her grief—she now looks as though she’s closing the deal.
Nobody would ever accuse Bob Stookey of being a trained OB-GYN—although he did treat that poor gal overseas after her miscarriage—but now he is convinced that he’s watching the birth of another new soul.
This one, a leader.
* * *
Standing in that airless room, caught in the feverish gazes of twenty-five expectant, frightened, hopeful faces, Lilly Caul waits for the whispering to quiet down one last time before laying her proverbial cards on the table.
“Let me bottom-line it for you,” she says finally. “Whatever you thought of Philip Blake, he kept us alive, and he kept the walkers at bay. It’s that simple. But you got used to living under a dictator. We all did.”
She pauses for a moment, parsing her words carefully, watching them watching her. The room gets so quiet, Lilly can hear the ticking of the foundation, and the whistling of the breeze through the bones of the hundred-year-old building.
“I don’t want to dictate anything,” she says. “But I’m willing to take responsibility for this community. We have an opportunity here. I’m not asking for power. I’m not asking for anything. All I’m saying is, we can make Woodbury a good place to live again, a safe place, a decent place. And I’m willing to be the one who … you know … guides us there. I won’t do it, though, if you don’t want me to. So it’s time we took a vote. No more dictatorships. Woodbury’s a democracy now. So here we go. All in favor of me taking the wheel for a while, raise your hands.”
Half the hands in the room go up immediately. Barbara and David Stern—sitting in the front row, their hands the highest of them all—are already smiling, their sad eyes belying the struggle ahead.
Some of the people in the back of the room look at each other as though searching for a signal.
Lilly lets out a sigh of both profound relief and exhaustion when the rest of the hands go up.
* * *
Sleep comes hard that night, despite Lilly’s fatigue. It feels as though she hasn’t slept in her own bed in years—in fact, hasn’t slept in years—when, in fact, it’s only been a couple of days. She dozes off and on and gets up a couple of times to pee, and while she’s up, she discovers Austin’s things scattered across the apartment.
With a tenderness and sorrow that sneaks up on her, she carefully gathers all of his personal effects—his lighter, a deck of playing cards, a pocketknife, a few articles of his clothing, including a spare hoodie and a porkpie hat—and puts them in a drawer for safekeeping. She would never throw them out. But she needs to clear the deck for the challenges ahead.
Then she sits down and has a good cry.
When she goes back to bed, she gets an idea—something that she and the rest of Woodbury should do first thing in the morning before they tackle any of the other myriad tasks that need to be done. She sleeps for a few hours, and when she awakens to a room full of sunlight, the rays slanting through the curtains, she feels transformed. She gets dressed and then walks down to the square.
A few of the older townspeople with weaker bladders and aging prostates have already convened in the diner across from the courthouse and fired up the ancient stainless-steel coffee urn by the time Lilly arrives. They greet her with a conviviality reserved for world leaders. She gets the sense that everybody’s secretly relieved that the Governor’s regime is over, and people are delighted to learn it’s Lilly who has stepped up.
She tells them her idea, and they all agree it’s a good one. Lilly enlists a couple of the stronger folks to go out and spread the word, and an hour later, the entire town has gathered in the bleacher section of the speedway.
Lilly takes center stage—walking out across the dusty infield, standing in the former fight ring where men and women fought to the death for the titillation of the residents—and she thanks everybody for coming, says a few words about her plans for the future, and finally asks everybody to bow their heads for a moment in remembrance of those among their number who have passed away.
Then she simply lists the names of the men and women who have died over the past weeks and months in the struggle to survive.
For nearly five minutes, the slow litany of names echoes up into the robin’s-egg-blue sky. “Scott Moon … Megan Lafferty … Josh Lee Hamilton … Caesar Martinez … Doc Stevens … Alice Warren … Bruce Cooper … Gus Strunk … Jim Steagal … Raymond Hilliard … Gabe Harris … Rudy Warburton … Austin Ballard…”
On and on, she recites the names in a strong, respectful, resonant voice, pausing for a moment after each of them as the wind takes them off into the echoing reaches of the stadium. She has memorized most of them, glancing down only occasionally at her crib notes scrawled on an index card nestled in her moist palm for a few last names she never knew before today. Finally she comes to the last name and pauses for a beat before saying it without emotion.
“Philip Blake.”
The name has its own echo—ghostly, profane—as it reverberates on the breeze. She glances up at the beleaguered crowd gathered against the chain-link barrier, most of the bowed heads turning upward to look at her. Silence greets the exchange of glances. Lilly lets out a long exhalation of breath and then nods. “May God have mercy on their souls,” she says.
A smattering of whispered responses and amens drifts across the arena.
Lilly invites everybody onto the field for the final phase of the ritual. Slowly, one by one, the elders and children and surviving members of the militia file through the gate and onto the dirt infield. Lilly supervises the dismantling.
They take down the post and shackles that once bound walkers to the periphery of the fighting ring. They clean up the vestibules and cloisters, removing the forlorn remnants of torn clothing and spent shells and broken bats and mangled blades that litter the passageways. They clean up the congealed puddles of blood. They sweep the ramps, wipe down the walls, and toss all evidence of the fights into huge garbage bins. A few of the younger men even go down into the catacombs beneath the stadium and destroy the walkers still enclosed in their hellish purgatory, and Lilly begins to feel their housekeeping project is a cleansing of a deeper sort.
The Roman Circus officially closes today—no more gladiators, no more fights other than the collective one for survival.
While they work, Lilly notices something else that surprises her. Very subtly at first, but gathering momentum as the infield transforms, moods begin to lighten. People start talking to each other in positive tones, cracking jokes, reminiscing about the old days, and hinting at better times to come. Barbara Stern suggests that they turn the grounds of the infield into a vegetable garden—the feed store still has viable seeds in it—and Lilly thinks that’s a damn fine idea.
And for one brief stretch of time, in the warming sun of a Georgia spring morning—however fleeting it might be—people almost seem happy.
Almost.
* * *
By sunset that evening, things have settled down in the new Woodbury.
The barricade has been reinforced on the southeast and north corners of town, a new patrol schedule established—the surrounding woodlands remaining relatively quiet—and the town’s supply of fuel, drinking water, and dried goods is accounted for and distributed evenly among the residents. No more bartering, no more politics, no more questions asked. They have enough provisions and sources of energy to keep them going for months—and Lilly sets up a town meeting room in the courthouse, where she begins the process of establishing a sort of steering committee among the elders and heads of families to vote
on critical matters.
As the dusk presses in and the air cools, Lilly finally decides to head back home. She’s flagging from the pain that lingers in her lower back, and the intermittent cramps that still torment her, but she’s as clear-headed and grounded as she’s ever been.
Exhausted but oddly tranquil, she walks along the deserted sidewalk toward her apartment building, thinking about Austin, thinking about Josh, and thinking about her father, when she sees a familiar figure trundling along on the opposite side of the street with a dark gunnysack dripping black droplets on the boardwalk.
“Bob?” She crosses the street and approaches him warily, gazing at the blood-sodden sack. “What’s going on? What are you doing?”
He pauses in the shadows, a distant sodium vapor light barely illuminating his weathered features. “Nothing much … um, you know … takin’ care of business.” He looks strangely nervous and embarrassed. Since he managed to stop drinking, his grooming has improved, his greasy hair now pomaded neatly back away from his deeply creased forehead, accentuating the crow’s-feet around his droopy eyes.
“I don’t mean to be nosy, Bob.” She nods at the sack. “But this is the second time I’ve seen you hauling something disgusting across town. It’s none of my business, but is that by any chance—?”
“It ain’t human, Lilly,” he blurts. “Got it down by the switchyard. It’s just meat.”
“Meat?”
“Pieces of a rabbit I found in one of my traps, just a carcass.”
Lilly looks at him. “Bob, I don’t—”
“I promised him, Lilly.” All the pretense goes out of him then, his shoulders slumping with despair, maybe even a little shame. “This thing … it’s still in there … poor wretched creature … was once his daughter, and I promised him. I had to keep that promise.”
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