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 connecti
ng 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.
The play set—of course—is deluxe. Rich folks love to spoil their kids with shit like this. This one—more than likely a haunt of the missing kid—has got all the bells and whistles: slide, clubhouse, four swings, climbing wall, jungle gym, and sandbox.
“We got it made here,” Philip goes on, turning back to his work. “Long as we keep our heads screwed on straight, we’re gonna be fine.”
As they position the next section, the rustling sounds of their movements and the creak of the planks mask the telltale noise of shuffling footsteps.
The footsteps are coming from across the street. Philip doesn’t hear them until the errant zombie is close enough for its odor to register.
Nick is the first one to smell it: that black, oily, mildewy combination of rotting protein and decay—like human waste cooking in bacon grease. It immediately puts Nick’s guard up. “Wait a minute,” he says, holding a section of planking. “You smell—”
“Yeah, smells like—”
A fish-belly arm bursts through a gap in the fencing, grabbing a hank of Philip’s denim shirt.
* * *
The assailant was once a middle-aged woman in a designer running suit, now an emaciated wraith with torn sleeves, blackened, exposed teeth, and the button eyes of a prehistoric fish, her hooked hand clutching Philip’s shirttail with the vise grip of frozen dead fingers. She lets out a low groan like a broken pipe organ as Philip spins toward his axe, which lies canted against a wheelbarrow twenty feet away.
Too damn far.
The dead lady goes for Philip’s neck with the autonomic hunger of a giant snapping turtle, and across the yard, Nick fumbles for a weapon, but it’s all happening too fast. Philip rears backward with a grunt, just now realizing that he still holds the nail gun. He dodges the snapping teeth, and then instinctively raises the muzzle of the nail gun.
In one quick movement, he touches the tip to the thing’s brow.
FFFFFFFFFFFUMP!
The lady zombie stiffens.
Icy fingers release their grip on Philip.
He pulls himself free, huffing and puffing, gaping at the thing.
The vertical cadaver teeters for a moment, wobbling as if drunk, shuddering in its soiled velveteen Pierre Cardin warm-up, but it will not go down. The head of the six-inch galvanized nail is visible above the ridge of the lady’s nose like a tiny coin stuck there.
The thing remains upright for endless moments, its sharklike eyes turned upward, until it begins to slowly stagger backward across the parkway, its ruined face taking on a strange, almost dreamy expression.
For a moment, it looks as though the thing is remembering something, or hearing some high-pitched whistle. Then it collapses in the grass.
* * *
“I think the nail does just enough damage to take ’em out,” Philip is saying after dinner, pacing back and forth across the shuttered windows of the lavish dining room, the nail gun in his hand like a visual aid.
The others are sitting at the long burnished oak table, the remnants of dinner lying strewn in front of them. Brian cooked for the group that night, defrosting a roast in the microwave and making gravy with a vintage cabernet and a splash of cream. Penny is in the adjacent family room watching a DVD of Dora the Explorer.
“Yeah, but did you see the way that thing went down?” Nick points out, pushing an uneaten gob of meat across his plate. “After you zapped it … looked like the damn thing was stoned for a second.”
Philip keeps pacing, clicking the trigger of the nail gun and thinking. “Yeah but it did go down.”
“It’s quieter than a gun, I’ll give you that.”
“And it’s a hell of a lot easier than splitting their skulls open with an axe.”
Bobby has just started in on his second helping of pot roast and gravy. “Too bad you don’t have a six-mile extension cord,” he says with his mouth full.
Philip clicks the trigger a few more times. “Maybe we could hook this puppy up to a battery.”
Nick looks up. “Like a car battery?”
“No, like something you could carry more easily, something like one of them big lantern batteries or something outta one of them electric mowers.”
Nick shrugs.
Bobby eats.
Philip paces and thinks.
Brian stares at the wall, mumbling, “Something to do with their brains.”
“Say what?” Philip looks at his brother. “What was that, Bri?”
Brian looks at him. “Those things … the sickness. It’s basically in the brain, right? It’s gotta be.” He pauses. He looks at his plate. “I still say we don’t even know they’re dead.”
Nick looks at Brian. “You mean after we take ’em out? After we … destroy ’em?”
“No, I mean before,” Brian says. “I mean, like, the condition they’re in.”
Philip stops pacing. “Shit, man … on Monday, I saw one of ’em get squashed by an eighteen-wheeler and ten minutes later, it’s dragging itself along the street with its guts hanging out. They’ve been saying it on all the news reports. They’re dead, sport. They’re way dead.”
“I’m just saying, the central nervous system, man, it’s complicated. All the shit in the environment right now, new strains of shit.”
“Hey, you want to take one of them things to a doctor for a checkup, be my guest.”
Brian sighs. “All I’m saying is, we don’t know enough yet. We don’t know shit.”
“We know all we need to know,” Philip says, giving his brother a look. “We know there’s more of them fucking things every day, and all they seem to want to do is have us for lunch. Which is why we’re gonna hang here for a while, let things play out a little.”
Brian breathes out a painful, weary sigh. The others are silent.
In the lull, they can hear the faint noises that they’ve been hearing all night, coming from the darkness outside: the muffled, intermittent thudding of insensate figures bumping up against the makeshift barricade.
Despite Philip’s efforts to erect the rampart quickly and quietly, the commotion of the day’s construction project has drawn more of the walking corpses.
“How long do you think we’re gonna be able to stay here?” Brian asks softly.
Philip sits down, lays the nail gun on the table and takes another sip of his bourbon. He nods toward the family room, where the whimsical voices of children’s programming drift incongruously. “She needs a break,
” Philip says. “She’s exhausted.”
“She loves that play set out back,” Brian says with a weak smile.
Philip nods. “She can live a normal life here for a while.”
Everybody looks at him. Everybody silently chews on the concept.
“Here’s to all the rich motherfuckers of the world,” Philip says, raising his glass.
The others toast without really knowing just exactly what they’re toasting … or how long it will last.
FOUR
The next day, in the clean autumn sun, Penny plays in the backyard under the watchful gaze of Brian. She plays throughout the morning while the others take inventory and sort through their supplies. In the afternoon, Philip and Nick secure the window wells in the basement with extra planking, and try unsuccessfully to rig the nail gun to DC power, while Bobby, Brian, and Penny play cards in the family room.
The proximity of the undead is a constant factor, swimming sharklike under the surface of every decision, every activity. But for the moment, there’s just an occasional stray, an errant wanderer bumping up against the privacy fence, then shambling away. For the most part, the activity behind the seven-foot cedar bulwark on Green Briar Lane has, so far, gone unnoticed by the swarm.
That night, after dinner, with the shades drawn, they all watch a Jim Carrey movie in the family room, and they almost feel normal again. They’re all starting to get used to this place. The occasional muffled thump out in the darkness barely registers now. Brian has practically forgotten the missing twelve-year-old, and after Penny goes to bed, the men make long-term plans.
They discuss the implications of staying in the Colonial as long as supplies hold out. They’ve got enough provisions for weeks. Nick wonders if they should send out a scout, maybe gauge the situation on the roads into Atlanta, but Philip is adamant about staying put. “Let whoever’s out there duke it out among themselves,” Philip advises.
Nick is still keeping tabs on the radio, TV, and Internet … and like the failing bodily functions of a terminal patient, the media seem to be sparking out one organ at a time. By this point, most radio stations are playing either recorded programming or useless emergency information. TV networks—the ones on basic cable that are still up and running—are now resorting to either twenty-four-hour automated civil defense announcements or inexplicable, incongruous reruns of banal late-night infomercials.
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