Brian takes a step closer. “Nick, what the hell is going on?”
Still no answer. Nick tries to load the shells with shaky hands and he drops one. It rolls across the floor. Nick fumbles another one into the breech, and then pumps it home with a clang. “‘Behold he who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep…’”
“Nick!” Brian grabs the man’s shoulder and spins him around. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
For a moment, it almost looks like Nick is about to swing the shotgun up and blow Brian’s head off—the look of unadulterated fury contorts Nick’s face. Then he gets himself under control, and swallows, and looks at Brian and says, “This can’t go on.”
Then, without another word, Nick turns and marches across the room and out the front door.
Brian grabs his .38, shoves it down the back of his belt, and hurries after Nick.
TWENTY-TWO
The purple light of dusk settles over the landscape. Icy winds toss the trees along the edges of the woods bordering Woodbury. The air swirls with the odors of wood smoke and carbon monoxide, as well as the unceasing whine of dirt racers emanating from the center of town. The back streets are fairly deserted, most of the inhabitants at the track … but still, it’s a miracle nobody sees Brian and Nick stumbling across the vacant lot bordering the safe zone.
Nick prays furiously as he heads for the woods, carrying the pistol-grip shotgun on his shoulder like some kind of holy bludgeon. Brian keeps grabbing at Nick, trying to slow him down, trying to get him to stop his goddamn praying for one second and talk like a normal person, but Nick is driven by some feverish objective.
At last, as they approach the tree line, Brian yanks at Nick’s coat so hard, he nearly knocks him over. “What the fuck are you doing?”
Nick spins and gives Brian a hard look. “I saw him dragging a girl out here.” Nick’s voice is brittle and on the verge of tears.
“Philip?”
“It can’t go on, Brian—”
“What girl?”
“Someone from town, he took her by force. Whatever he’s doing, it has to stop.”
Brian studies Nick’s quivering chin. Nick’s eyes fill up with tears. Brian takes a deep breath. “Okay, calm down for a second, just calm down.”
“He’s got the darkness in him, Brian. Let go of me. It’s gotta stop.”
“You saw him take a girl but you didn’t—”
“Let go of me, Brian.”
For a moment, Brian just stands there, clutching at Nick’s sleeve. Gooseflesh ripples down Brian’s back, his midsection going cold. He refuses to accept this. There has to be a way to get things back on track, get things under control.
Finally, after an agonizing pause, Brian looks at Nick and says, “Show me.”
* * *
Nick takes Brian down a narrow, untrimmed footpath that snakes through a copse of pecan trees. Overgrown with hemlock and ironweed, the path is already lousy with shadows. Magic hour is closing in, the temperature nose-diving.
Brambles and thorns tear at their jackets as they hasten toward a break in the foliage.
To their right, through a latticework of leaves, they can see the southernmost edge of the construction site, where a new section of the wooden barricade is going up. Piles of timber lie nearby. The bulldozer sits in the gloom. Nick indicates a clearing up ahead.
“There he is,” Nick whispers as they approach a deadfall on the threshold of the clearing. He drops down behind the logs, looking almost like a hysterical little boy playing army. Brian joins him, crouching down and peering over the top of the rotting timber.
About twenty yards in the distance, in a natural basin of mossy earth, shrouded by a canopy of ancient live oaks and longleaf pine, Philip Blake is visible. The ground is carpeted in matted pine needles, fungus, and weeds, and a low faint glow of methane clings to the forest floor, a ghostly magenta haze that gives the clearing an almost mystical cast. Nick raises the shotgun. “‘Dear Lord,’” he mumbles under his breath, “‘please cleanse us of all this unrighteousness—’”
“Nick, stop it,” Brian whispers.
“‘I renounce all sins,’” Nick drones on, gaping at the horror in the clearing. “‘They offend thee, O Lord—’”
“Shut up, just shut up!” Brian is trying to make sense of it all. In the shadows, it’s hard to make out exactly what they’re looking at. At first glance, it looks like Philip is out there, kneeling down in the weeds, hog-tying a pig. His denim jacket soaked in sweat, covered in cockleburs, he winds rope around the wrists and ankles of a writhing figure beneath him.
A frigid blast of horror swirls through Brian when he realizes it is indeed a young woman on the ground, her blouse torn, her mouth gagged with nylon rope. “Jesus Christ, what the hell is he—”
Nick keeps babbling under his breath: “‘Forgive me, Lord, for what I’m about to do, and with the help of Thy grace I serve Thy will—’”
“Shut the fuck up!” Brian’s brain is chugging, seizing up with panic, racing with frantic assumptions: Philip is either going to rape this poor woman or kill her and feed her to Penny. Something has to be done, and it has to be done quickly. Nick is right. He was right all along. There has to be a way to stop this before—
A blur of movement next to Brian.
Nick is vaulting over the deadfall, pushing his way through the briars and into the clearing.
* * *
“Nick, wait!” Brian gets halfway through the brambles when he sees the deadly tableau taking shape in the shadowy clearing like an arrangement of players on a surreal chessboard, coming together in dreamy slow motion.
Nick stumbles out into the open with his shotgun raised at Philip, and Philip, startled by the sudden sound of Brian’s warning cry, springs to his feet. Weaponless, glancing nervously from the wriggling women to the duffel bag lying in the toadstools next to her, Philip raises his hands. “Put that goddamn thing down, Nicky.”
Nick raises the bead of the muzzle until it’s trained directly on Philip. “Devil’s got his hooks in you, Philip. You’ve sinned against God … desecrated His name. It’s in the hands of the Lord now.”
Brian is staggering into the clearing, fumbling for his .38, hyperventilating with adrenaline. “Nick, don’t!—DON’T DO IT!” Brian’s mind races as he comes to a halt ten feet behind Nick.
By this point, the girl on the ground has managed to roll over—still bound and gagged—and she’s crying into the moist earth, as if wishing it would open up and let her climb in and die. Meanwhile, Nick and Philip are standing six feet away from each other, their gazes locked.
“What are you, the avenging angel?” Philip asks his longtime friend.
“Maybe I am.”
“This doesn’t concern you, Nicky.”
Nick is trembling with emotion, his eyes blinking away tears. “There’s a better place for you and your daughter, Philly.”
Philip stands as still as a stone monument, his narrow, weathered face looking positively grotesque in the gloomy light. “And I suppose you’re the one who’s gonna send me and Penny to Glory?”
“Somebody’s gotta stop this, Philly. Might as well be me.” Nick raises the sight to his eye and mutters, “‘Lord, please forgive—’”
“Nick, wait!—Please, please! Listen to me!” Brian circles around with the .38 pointed up in the air like he’s a referee. He comes within inches of Nick, who still has his sight fixed on Philip. Brian babbles: “All the years of bumming around Waynesboro, all the laughs you shared, all the miles we put behind us—doesn’t that count for something? Philip saved our lives! Things have gotten out of hand, yeah. But things can be put back together. Put the gun down, Nick. I’m begging you.”
Nick shakes. He keeps the sight fixed. Sweat beads on his forehead.
Philip takes a step closer. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. Nicky’s always been a talker. He ain’t got the stones to shoot somebody who’s still alive.”
Nick trembles furiously.
Brian watches, frozen with indecision.
Philip calmly reaches down to the girl, grabs her by the scruff of her collar, and yanks her up like a stray piece of luggage. He turns and starts dragging the squirming girl toward the far side of the clearing.
Nick’s voice drops into a lower register. “Have mercy on us all.”
The shotgun ratchets suddenly.
And the muzzle roars.
* * *
A 12-gauge shotgun is a blunt instrument. The lethal .33-caliber pellets can spread as wide as a foot or more in a short distance, tearing through its target with enough force to penetrate a cinder block.
The buckshot that hits Philip in the back punches through the meat of his shoulder blades and the cords of his neck, sending half his brain stem out through the front of his throat. The grains also take the side of the girl’s scalp off, killing her instantly. The two bodies are launched in a cloud of pink mist.
The pair tumble forward in a tangled clench before sprawling side by side on the forest floor, their arms and legs akimbo. The girl is already stone-still dead but Philip twitches in his death throes for several agonizing seconds. His face is upturned, frozen in a mask of utter surprise. He tries to breathe but the damage to his brain is shutting everything down.
The shock of what has just happened drives Nick Parsons to his knees, his finger still frozen on the trigger pad, the shotgun sizzling hot.
His vision tunnels as he gapes at the damage inflicted on the two human bodies in the path of the blast. He drops the shotgun in the weeds and moves his mouth but makes no sound. What has he done? He feels himself contracting inward like a seed pod, cold and desolate, the clanging noise of Armageddon ringing in his ears, the scalding tears of shame coming now in rivulets down his face: What has he done? What has he done? What has he done?
* * *
Brian Blake turns to ice. His pupils dilate. The sight of his brother lying in a bloody heap on the ground next to the dead girl stamps itself forever on his brain. All other thoughts drain out of his mind.
Only the noise of Nick’s keening wails penetrate Brian’s stupor.
Howling with sobs now, Nick is still on his knees next to Brian. All reason and sanity have drained out of Nick Parsons’s face, and he caterwauls at the sight of the carnage. Bursts of gibberish come out of him in stringers of snot—part prayer, part insane pleading—his breath showing in the chill twilight. He looks up at the heavens.
Brian raises the .38 without thinking—a jolt of psychotic rage driving him—and he squeezes off a single shot, point-blank, into the side of Nick Parsons’s skull.
The battering ram drives Nick over in a jet of red fluid, the slug ripping through his brain, coming out the other side and chewing through a tree. Nick folds, eyes rolling back, brain already dead.
He lands with the profound surrender of a child going to sleep.
* * *
The passage of time loses all meaning. Brian doesn’t see the dark silhouettes of figures approaching through the distant trees, drawn to the noise. Nor does he have any awareness of moving across the clearing to the mangled pair of bodies. But somehow, without even being conscious of it, Brian Blake ends up on the ground next to Philip, cradling his younger brother’s bloody form in his lap.
He gazes down at Philip’s grizzled face, now as pale as alabaster, stippled with blood.
A flicker of life still glints in Philip’s eyes, as the two brothers meet each other’s gaze. For a brief instant, Brian flinches at the glacier of sorrow cutting through him, the connection between the two siblings as thick as blood, as deep as the earth, now fracturing Brian’s soul with the power of shifting tectonic plates. The weight of their common history—the endless tedium of grammar school, the blessed summer vacations, the passing of late-night whispers from one bunk bed to the other, their first beers on that ill-fated Appalachian camping trip, their secrets, their fights, their small-town dreams foiled by life’s cruel equations—all of it slices through his soul.
Brian weeps.
His cries—as shrill and keen as that of an animal in a trap—rise up into the darkening sky, blending with the distant whining of race cars. He sobs so hard he doesn’t even notice Philip’s passing.
When Brian looks back down at his brother, Philip’s face has hardened into a marble-white sculpture.
* * *
The foliage trembles twenty feet away. At least a dozen Biters of all shapes and sizes are forcing their way through the thicket.
The first one, an adult male in tattered work clothes, pops through the branches with arms reaching at the nothingness, shoe-button eyes scanning the clearing. The thing fixes its gaze on the closest meal: Philip’s cooling corpse.
Brian Blake rises to his feet and turns away. He can’t watch. He knows this is the best option. The only option. Let the zombies clean up the mess.
He shoves the .38 back behind his belt and heads for the construction site.
* * *
Brian finds a perch on top of a truck cab to wait out the feeding frenzy.
His brain is a television tuned to many stations all at once. He draws his pistol and clutches it like a security blanket.
The cacophony of voices, the fragments of half-formed images, all crackle and flicker inside Brian’s skull. The twilight has passed into full-bore darkness, the closest vapor light hundreds of yards off. But Brian sees the world around him in photo-negative brilliance now, his fear as keen as a knife edge. He is alone now … as alone as he has ever been … and it eats at him deeper than any zombie.
The wet, gurgling, sucking noises coming from the clearing are barely audible above the constant buzzing of dirt track racers. Somewhere in the back of Brian’s hectic thoughts, he knows that the din of the racetrack is drowning the commotion in the clearing—probably part of Philip’s plan, his abduction of the girl going unheard, unseen.
Through the lacing of brambles and foliage, Brian can see the silhouettes of monsters tearing into the human remains left in the clearing. Clusters of zombies hunch over their quarry, apelike, gorging on hunks of flesh, detached bones dripping with gore, flaps of skin, torn scalps, unidentified appendages, and sopping organs still warm and steaming in the chill air. More of them crowd in, clumsily shoving each other aside, grunting for a morsel.
Brian closes his eyes.
For a moment, he wonders if he should pray. He wonders if he should offer a silent eulogy for his brother, for Nick and the woman, for Penny, for Bobby Marsh, for David Chalmers, for the dead, for the living, and for this whole fucked-up, broken, godforsaken world. But he doesn’t. He simply sits there as the zombies feed.
Some time later—God only knows when—the Biters drift away from the flensed, excoriated remains now lying strewn across the clearing.
Brian slips off the roof of the truck cab and makes his way back through the darkness to the apartment.
* * *
That night, Brian sits in the empty apartment, in the living room, in front of the empty, scummy fish tank. It’s the end of the programming day in Brian’s brain. The national anthem has been sung, the broadcast has signed off, and now only a blizzard of white noise blankets his thoughts.
Still clad in his filthy jacket, he sits staring through the fish tank’s rectangular glass side—which is filmed in green mold, and mottled with specks of chum—as though watching some monotonous still life being broadcast from hell. He sits this way, staring trancelike into the vacuous heart of that fish tank, for endless minutes. The minutes turn into hours. His mind-screen is a blank cathode-ray tube boiling with electronic snow. The coming of daylight barely registers. He doesn’t hear the commotion outside the apartment, the troubled voices, the sounds of vehicles.
The day drags on—time now meaningless—until the next evening draws its curtain of darkness down over the apartment. Brian sits in the dark, oblivious to the passage of time, continuing to stare with catatonic interest at the invisible broadcast originating from the empty she
ll of the fish tank. The next morning comes and goes.
At some point that next day, Brian blinks. The flicker of a message sparks and sputters across the blank screen of his mind. At first, it’s faint and garbled, like a poorly transmitted signal, but with each passing second, it grows stronger, clearer, louder: GOOD-BYE.
Like a depth charge in the center of his soul, the word implodes in a convulsion of white-hot energy, jerking him forward in the shopworn armchair, sitting him bolt upright, forcing open his eyes.
—GOOD-BYE—
* * *
He’s dehydrated and stiff, his stomach empty, his pants soaked through with his own urine. For nearly thirty-six hours, he sat in that chair, comatose, as still as a divining rod, and moving isn’t easy at first, but he feels cleansed, scourged, as clearheaded as he’s ever been. He limps into the kitchen and finds little in the cupboard other than a couple of cans of peaches. He tears one open and wolfs the whole thing down, the juice running across his chin. Peaches have never tasted so good. In fact, it occurs to him that perhaps he has never tasted peaches before. He goes into the bedroom and changes out of his disgusting clothes … puts on his only other pair of jeans and his only other shirt (an AC/DC silk-screened tee). He finds his spare Dr. Martens boots and slips them on.
Mounted on the back of the door is a cracked, floor-length mirror.
A wiry, disheveled, compact ferret of a man stares back at him. The crack in the looking glass bisects his narrow visage and his thatch of long, unruly black hair. His face is fringed with straggly whiskers, his eyes sunken and rimmed in dark circles. He hardly recognizes himself.
“Whatever,” he says to the mirror, and walks out of the room.
He finds his .38 in the living room, along with one last speed-loader—the last six rounds in his possession—and he shoves the gun down the back of his belt, the speed-loader into his pocket.
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