Brian’s heart hammers in his chest as they slip inside the dark barn.
The stench of mold and urine fills their senses as they work their way back through the fetid shadows to the rear of the barn, where two dark heaps lie on the floor in puddles of blood as black as oil. At first, the shapes don’t even look human, but when the beam of Brian’s flashlight falls on a pale face, Brian lets out a gasp.
“Holy fucking shit.”
The man and woman are still alive, barely, their faces disfigured and swollen, their midsections exposed like raw meat. A thin tendril of steam rises from festering, sucking wounds. Both captives are semiconscious, their parboiled eyes fixed on the rafters. The woman is brutalized, a broken doll with legs akimbo and blood patterns covering her pasty, tattooed flesh.
Brian begins to tremble. “Holy shit … what have we…? Holy fucking shit…”
Nick kneels by the woman. “Brian, get some water.”
“What about—”
“Get it from the well! Hurry!”
Brian hands over his flashlight, spins, and hustles back the way he came.
Nick shines the light on the constellation of wounds and sores—some old and infected, some fresh—across a hundred percent of their twisted bodies. The man’s chest rises and falls quickly, convulsively, with shallow breaths. The woman struggles to fix her rheumy gaze on Nick. She is blinking wildly.
Her lips move beneath the duct tape. Nick starts to carefully peel the gag away from her mouth.
“P-p-pleeee … kuhhh…” She’s trying to say something urgent but Nick can’t understand her.
“It’s okay, we’re gonna get you outta here, it’s okay, you’re gonna make it.”
“K-khhh…”
“Cold?” Nick tries to pull her pants back on her. “Try to breathe, try to—”
“K-khhlll.”
“What? I can’t—”
The woman tries to swallow, and again she says, “K-kill uss … p-please…”
Nick stares. His guts go cold. He feels something softly nudging his hip and he looks down and sees the woman’s scabby hand fumbling at the pistol grip sticking out of his belt. Nick feels all the fight go out of him. His heart sinks down through the floor.
He pulls the .357 from his belt and stands up and gazes down at the abominations on the floor of the barn for a long time.
He says a prayer: the Twenty-third Psalm.
* * *
Brian is on his way back to the barn with a plastic pail of well water when he hears the two muffled pops from inside the barn. Like firecrackers bursting inside tin cans, the blasts are short and sharp. The sound of them makes Brian freeze in his tracks, the water sloshing over the rim of the bucket. He sucks in a startled breath.
Then he sees, out of the corner of his eye, a faint light flickering on in one of the villa’s second-floor windows: Philip’s room. A flashlight up there plays across the window, then vanishes. This is followed by a series of muffled footsteps banging down the stairs and through the house, hard and fast, and this gets Brian moving again.
He drops the pail. He charges back across the property to the barn. He slams through the doorway, plunging into the dark. Then he hurtles through the shadows, toward the silver beam of light on the floor in the rear. He sees Nick standing over the captives.
A ribbon of cordite smoke rises from the muzzle of the .357 in Nick’s right hand, now hanging at his side as he stares down at the bodies.
Brian joins Nick and starts to say something when all at once Brian looks down and sees the head wounds: blossoms of gore bloom up the stall door—shimmering in the horizontal light beam.
The man and the woman are stone-cold dead, each one of them now lying supine in their drying fluids, their faces at peace, released from their contortions of misery. Again, Brian tries to say something.
He can’t get out any words.
* * *
A moment later, in the darkness across the barn, the double doors burst open and Philip storms in. Fists clenched at his sides, face chiseled with rage, eyes flashing with white-hot madness, he marches toward the light. He looks as though he’s going to devour somebody. He has a pistol shoved down the side of his belt and a machete banging on one hip.
He gets about halfway across the barn before he starts to slow down.
Nick has turned away from the bodies and is now standing his ground, staring at Philip as he approaches. Brian steps back, a tidal wave of shame crashing down over him. He feels like his soul is being ripped in half. He stares at the floor as his brother approaches slowly now, warily, glancing nervously from the dead bodies to Nick, and then to Brian, and then back at the dead bodies.
For the longest time, nobody can think of anything to say. Philip keeps looking at Brian, and Brian keeps trying to conceal the paralyzing shame spreading through him, but the more he tries to conceal it, the more it drags him down.
If Brian only had the guts for it, he would put the barrel of the snub-nose in his mouth right now and put himself out of his misery. In some strange way, he feels responsible for this—for all of it—but he’s too much of a coward to kill himself like a man.
He can only stand there and look away in abject shame and humiliation.
And like an invisible chain reaction, the pathetic, gruesome tableau of desecrated bodies—combined with the unyielding silence of his brother and his friend—begins to break Philip down.
He fights the tears pooling in his eyes and juts his quivering chin out in a mixture of defiance and self-loathing. He works his mouth like he’s got something important to impart, and it takes a huge effort to speak, but he finally manages to say in a choked mutter, “Whatever.”
Nick looks mortified, staring at Philip in disbelief. “‘Whatever’?”
Philip turns and walks away, pulling the Glock from his belt as he goes. He snaps the slide and fires into the wall of the barn—BOOOOMMMMMM!—the recoil kicking in his hand, the loud bark making Brian jump. BOOOOOMMMM! Another blast flashes in the darkness, taking a chunk of the door. BOOOOOMMMM! The third shot puts a chink in the rafter and rains debris down on the floor.
Philip angrily kicks the doors open and storms out of the barn.
The silence left behind seems to ripple for a moment with afterimages of Philip’s fiery wrath. Brian hasn’t taken his eyes off the floor throughout all this, and he continues to hang his head and stare miserably at the moldy matted hay. Nick takes one last look at the bodies, and then lets out a long, pained, unsteady breath. He looks at Brian, and he shakes his head. “There you have it,” he says.
But something behind his words—the subtle tone of dread in his voice—tells Brian that things have now irrevocably changed in their little dysfunctional family.
TWENTY
“What the fuck is he doing?” Nick stands at the villa’s front window, staring out at the overcast morning.
Across the front of the property, at the top of the driveway, Philip has Penny on a modified dog leash, assembled from spare parts found in the toolshed—a long length of copper pipe with a spiked collar threaded through one end. He drags her toward a Ford S-10 pickup parked on the grass. The truck is one of the vehicles owned by the bald man’s crew, and Philip has now loaded its cargo bed with canned goods, guns, provisions, and bedding.
Penny sputters and growls as she is yanked along, grabbing at the pipe leashed to her neck, biting at the air. In the diffuse, watery light, her dead face looks like a living Halloween mask, sculpted out of wormy-gray modeling clay.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Brian says, standing next to Nick, gazing out at the bizarre scene unfolding in the front yard. “He got up this morning convinced we can’t stay here anymore.”
“And why’s that?”
Brian shrugs. “I don’t know … after all that’s happened … I guess the place is like poison for him, full of ghosts … I don’t know.”
Brian and Nick have been up all night, guzzling coffee and discussing their
situation. Nick has been dancing around the fact that he thinks Philip has gone off his spindle, succumbing to the stress of losing Penny, and to the cumulative pressure of protecting them. Although Nick has stopped short of verbalizing it, he has alluded to the possibility that the Devil has gotten his hooks into Philip. Brian is too exhausted to argue metaphysics with Nick, but there is no denying the fact that things have become dire.
“Let him go,” Nick says finally, turning away from the window.
Brian looks at him. “What do you mean? You mean you’re staying?”
“Yeah, I’m staying, and you should, too.”
“Nick, come on.”
“How can we keep following him … after all this shit … the stuff that’s gone down?”
Brian wipes his mouth and thinks about it. “Look. I’ll say it again. What he did to those people is, like, beyond awful. He lost his way. And I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to look at him the same way again … but this is about survival now. We can’t split up. Our best shot is sticking together no matter what.”
Nick glances back out the window. “You really think we’re gonna make it to the Gulf Coast? That’s like four hundred miles and change.”
“Our best shot is doing it together.”
Nick fixes his gaze on Brian. “He’s got his dead daughter on a fucking leash. He pretty near beat you to death. He’s a loose cannon, Brian, and he’s gonna blow up in our faces.”
“That loose cannon got us all the way across Georgia from Waynesboro in one piece,” Brian says, a flare of anger burning in his gut. “So, he’s nuts, he’s volatile, he’s possessed by demons, he’s the prince of fucking darkness … he’s still my brother and he’s our best chance of survival.”
Nick looks at him. “Is that what we’re calling it now? Survival?”
“You want to stay here, be my guest.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that.”
Nick walks away, leaving Brian to turn back to the window and nervously watch his brother.
* * *
Utilizing a radiator hose as a siphon, they consolidate all the fuel on the property—from tractors, from vehicles, even from the Harleys—into the Ford S-10. All told, they’re able to top off the seventeen-gallon tank and then some. Philip arranges a place for Penny in the rear cargo bay by moving the boxes of supplies around into a semicircle and laying blankets down on the deck. He chains her to a U-bolt so she can’t get herself into any mischief or fall over the side.
Nick watches all this from his second-floor window, pacing the room like a caged animal. The reality of the situation starts to set in. He’ll be alone in this big old drafty villa. He’ll spend nights alone. He’ll spend the whole winter alone. He’ll hear the north winds shrieking through the gutters and the distant moaning of Biters wandering the orchards … all while biding his time alone. He’ll wake up alone and eat alone and forage for food alone and dream of better days alone and pray to God for deliverance … all by himself. As he watches Philip and Brian finish up the last of the preparations for departure, a twinge of regret tightens Nick’s midsection—seller’s remorse. He crosses the room to his closet.
It takes him a matter of seconds to stuff his essentials into a duffel bag.
He rushes out of the room and takes the stairs two at a time.
* * *
Brian is just settling into the passenger seat, and Philip is just putting the truck in gear, just beginning to pull away from the villa, when the sound of the front door ripping open reaches their ears.
Brian glances over his shoulder and sees Nick with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, running across the front parkway, waving them back.
* * *
It’s hard to believe that Philip would neglect to check under the pickup’s hood. Had he taken three minutes to make sure everything was in working order, he would have found the perforated hose. But Philip Blake is not exactly a hundred percent these days. His mind is a shortwave radio tuned to different stations now.
But regardless of whether it was a deliberate cut made by the home invaders after the firefight broke out (to ensure that nobody escaped), or it was a piece of flak that had pierced the truck’s grill, or it was simply a coincidental failure, the pickup begins to smoke and sputter less than five miles from the villa.
At a point approximately fifty miles southwest of Atlanta, in a place most folks around these parts call the Middle of Nowhere, the pickup hobbles off the highway and onto the gravel shoulder, where it stutters to a stop, all the warning lights across the dash flickering on. White vapor seeps out from under the hood, and the ignition won’t turn over. Philip lets out an alarming barrage of profanity, nearly kicking his logger boot through the floor. The other two men look down, silently waiting for the squall to pass. Brian wonders if this is what a battered wife feels like: too afraid to escape, too afraid to stay.
At length, Philip’s tantrum passes. He gets out and opens the hood.
Brian joins him. “What’s the verdict?”
“Screwed and tattooed.”
“No hope of fixing it?”
“You got a radiator hose on you?”
Brian glances over his shoulder. The side of the road slopes down to a ravine filled with old tires, weeds, and rubbish. Movement draws his gaze to the far end of the ravine—about a quarter of a mile away—where a cluster of Biters mill about in the garbage. They stumble around and root for flesh in the rocks like truffle-nuzzling pigs. They haven’t yet noticed the disabled vehicle now smoking on the side of the road three hundred yards away.
In the rear of the pickup, Penny yanks at her chain. The chain is threaded through her dog collar and bolted to the corrugated deck. The proximity of other upright corpses seems to be tweaking her, exciting her, disturbing her.
“What do you think?” Brian finally asks his brother, who has carefully lowered the hood and clicked it shut with a minimum of noise.
Nick is climbing out of the cab. He joins them. “What’s the plan?”
Brian looks at him. “The plan is … we’re fucked.”
Nick chews his fingernail, glancing back over his shoulder at the zombie conclave slowly working its way down the ravine, getting closer every minute. “Philip, we can’t sit here. Maybe we can find another car.”
Philip exhales a pained sigh. “All right, you fellas know the drill … grab your shit, I’ll get Penny.”
* * *
They light out with Penny on the leash, their backs laden with supplies. They hug the shoulder, following the highway. Brian limps along without complaint, despite the stabbing pain in his hip. Around Greenville, they have to take a detour due to an inexplicable pileup of wrecked vehicles, the scorched tangle of metal spanning across both northbound and southbound lanes, the area crawling with zombies. From a distance, it looks as though the earth itself has split open and vomited up hundreds of walking corpses.
They decide to take a two-lane—Rural Route 100—which wends its way southward, through Greenville, and around the congestion. And they get maybe a mile or two before Philip puts his hand up and stops.
“Hold on a second,” he says, frowning. He cocks his head. “What is that?”
“What is what?”
“That noise.”
“What noise?”
Philip listens. They all listen. Philip turns in a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the direction from which the sound is coming. “Is that an engine?”
Brian hears it now. “Sounds like a fucking tank.”
“Or maybe a bulldozer,” Nick ventures.
“What the fuck.” Philip narrows his eyes as he listens. “That can’t be too far away.”
They continue on. Less than a mile down the road, they come upon a dented sign:
WOODBURY—1 MI.
* * *
They continue on down the road, all eyes on the smoke-clogged western sky.
“Whoever they are, they got fuel,” Nick says.
Brian sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. “You
think they’re friendly?”
“I ain’t taking any chances,” Philip says. “C’mon … we’ll find a back way in, take it one step at a time.”
Philip leads them across the shoulder, then down a weedy slope.
They scuttle across an adjacent farm field, a vast and fallow valley of soft earth. Their boots sink into the mire as they go. The chill wind lashes at them, and it takes them an interminable amount of time to circumnavigate the outskirts before the remnants of an abandoned town begin to materialize ahead of them.
A Walmart sign rises above a stand of ancient live oaks. The golden arches of a McDonald’s are visible not far beyond the Walmart. Litter tumbles down empty streets, past postwar brick buildings and cookie-cutter condos. But on the north side of the town, within a maze of cyclone fences, the sounds of engines and hammering and the occasional voice reveal the presence of humans.
“Looks like they’re building a wall or somethin’,” Nick says as they pause under the cover of trees. In the distance, about two hundred yards away, a handful of figures labor over a tall wooden rampart closing off the north edge of town. The barricade already stretches nearly two blocks.
“Rest of the place looks dead,” Philip comments. “Can’t be many survivors.”
“What the hell is that?” Brian is pointing at a semicircle of high stanchions a few blocks west of the barricade. Clusters of arc lights point down at a large open space, obscured behind buildings and fences.
“Football field for the high school maybe?” Philip is reaching for his Glock. He pulls it out and checks the remaining rounds in the magazine. He’s got six hollow-points left.
“What are you thinking, Philip?” Nick looks anxious, jittery.
Brian wonders if Nick is worried about walking into another trap. Or maybe he’s just edgy around Philip. The truth is, Brian isn’t too keen on waltzing uninvited into this little ragtag community, especially considering the fact that they have a moldering zombie in tow, and a father of said zombie so tightly wound he seems capable of almost anything at any moment. But what choice do they have? Dark clouds are gathering on the western horizon again, and the temperature is plummeting.
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