Then he visits Penny.
“Hey there, kiddo,” he says with great tenderness as he enters the laundry room. The narrow chamber of linoleum reeks of the dead. Brian barely notices the smell. He goes over to the little creature, who growls and sputters at his presence, straining against her chains. She’s the color of cement, her eyes like smooth stones.
Brian crouches down in front of her, looks in her bucket. It’s empty.
He looks up at her. “You know I love you, right?”
The Penny-thing snarls.
Brian strokes the side of her delicate little ankle. “I’m going to go get some supplies, sweetheart. I’ll be back before you know it, don’t worry.”
The little dead thing cocks its head and lets out a groan that sounds like air running through rusty pipes. Brian pats her on the leg—out of the range of her rotting incisors—and then rises to his feet.
“See ya soon, sweetie.”
* * *
The moment that Brian slips unnoticed from the side door of the apartment, and starts north, striding through the raw winds of the afternoon, his head down, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, he can tell something is going on. The racetrack is silent. A couple of townspeople run past him, their eyes aglow with alarm. The air reeks of the dead. Off to the left, behind the barricade of buses and semis, scores of walking corpses wander along the barrier, sniffing for a way in. Up ahead, black smoke pours out of the clinic’s incinerator. Brian quickens his pace.
As he closes in on the town square, he can see, way in the distance, at the north end of the safe zone, where the fence is under construction, men standing on wooden parapets with rifles and binoculars. They don’t look happy. Brian hurries along. All his pain—the stiffness in his joints, the throb in his ribs, all of it—vanishes amid the high-voltage current of his adrenaline.
Woodbury keeps its food rations in a brick warehouse across from the old courthouse. Brian pauses in front of the warehouse when he sees the old derelict juicers loitering across the street in front of the flagstone government building with its chipped Romanesque columns. Other folks stand on the stone steps, nervously smoking cigarettes, while others crowd the entranceway. Brian crosses the intersection and approaches the gathering.
“What’s going on?” he asks the fat old man in the Salvation Army coat.
“Trouble in River City, son,” the old codger says, jerking a greasy thumb at the courthouse. “Half the town’s in there havin’ a powwow.”
“What happened?”
“Found three more residents out in the woods yesterday, picked clean as chicken bones … place is crawlin’ with roamers now, drawn by the racetrack most likely. Damn fools makin’ all that noise.”
For a moment, Brian considers his options. He could very easily avoid this mess, pack up, and move on. He could boost one of the four-wheelers and take Penny in the back and be gone in a flash.
He doesn’t owe these people anything. The safest bet is to not get involved, just get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s the smartest way to play it. But something deep inside Brian makes him reconsider. What would Philip do?
Brian stares at the crowd of townspeople milling about the entrance to the courthouse.
TWENTY-THREE
“Does anybody even know what their names were?” A woman in her late sixties with a halo of fright-wig gray hair stands up in the back of the community room on the first floor of the courthouse building, the veins in her neck wattle pulsing with tension.
The thirty or so beleaguered residents of Woodbury gathered around her—town elders, heads of small families, former merchants, and passers-through who landed here almost by mistake—fidget on folding chairs in tattered coats and muddy boots, facing the front of the narrow conference room. The space has an end-of-world feel to it, with crumbling plaster, overturned coffee urns, exposed wiring, and litter strewn across the parquet floor.
“What the fuck difference does it make?” barks Major Gene Gavin from the front of the room, his minions behind him with their M4 assault rifles on their hips like faux gangbangers. It feels right and proper to the Major to be standing at the head of this little town hall meeting right now, near the flagpoles displaying the American and Georgia State flags. Like MacArthur taking over Japan, or Stonewall Jackson at Bull Run, the Major relishes the opportunity to finally make his stand as the leader pro tem of this miserable town full of chickenshits and rejects. Ramrod tough in his green fatigues and jarhead brush cut, the Major has been waiting for this moment, biding his time for weeks.
No stranger to whipping pussies into shape, Gavin knows he needs respect in order to lead, and in order to be respected, he needs to be feared. Which is exactly how he used to deal with the weekend warriors under his command at Camp Ellenwood. Gavin was a survival instructor with the 221st Military Intelligence Battalion, and he used to torment those lily-livered weaklings on overnight bivouacs up to Scull Shoals by shitting in their duffels and giving them the rubber hose treatment for the smallest infractions. But that might as well have been a million years ago. This situation is Code Fucked, and Gavin is going to take every advantage to stay on top of things.
“It was just a couple of them new guys,” Gavin adds as an afterthought. “And some slut from Atlanta.”
An elderly gentlemen in the front stands up, his bony knees trembling: “All due respect … that was Jim Bridges’s daughter, and she weren’t no slut. Now, I think I speak for everybody when I say we need protection, maybe a curfew … keep people in after dark. Maybe we could take a vote.”
“Sit down, old man … before you hurt yourself.” Gavin gives the old geezer his best menacing look. “We got bigger problems to deal with now—there’s a goddamn convention of them Biters closing in on us.”
The old man takes his seat, grumbling to himself. “All that noise from the damn dirt races … that’s the reason them Biters is surroundin’ us.”
Gavin unsnaps the holster on his hip, exposing the grip of his .45, and takes a threatening step toward the old man. “I’m sorry, I don’t recall opening the floor to comments from the nursing home.” Gavin jabs a finger at the old man. “My advice is for you to shut the fuck up before you get yourself in trouble.”
A younger man springs to his feet two chairs away from the old man. “Take it easy, Gavin,” the younger man says. Tall, olive-skinned, his hair tucked under a bandana, he wears a sleeveless shirt that reveals heavily muscled arms. His dark eyes gleam with street-level smarts. “This ain’t some John Wayne movie, take it down a notch.”
Gavin turns to the man in the bandana, brandishing the .45 with menace. “Shut your mouth, Martinez, and put your spic ass back in your chair.”
Behind Gavin, the two Guardsmen tense up, swinging the muzzles of their M4s up and into ready positions, their eyes scanning the room.
The man named Martinez just shakes his head, and sits back down.
Gavin lets out a frustrated sigh.
“You people don’t seem to grasp the seriousness of this situation,” he says, holstering the .45 as he moves back to the front of the room, speaking with the cadence of a drill instructor. “We’re sittin’ ducks here, we don’t do somethin’ about them barricades. Got a bunch of freeloaders takin’ up space. Expecting everybody else to carry the weight. No discipline! I got news for ya, your little vacation is over. Gonna be some new rules, and you’re all gonna pitch in, and you’re gonna do what you’re told, and you’re gonna keep your fucking mouths shut! Am I making myself clear?”
Gavin pauses, daring somebody to object.
The townspeople sit in silence, looking like children who’ve been sent to the principal’s office. In one corner, Stevens, the physician, sits next to a young woman in her twenties. Dressed in a stained smock, the girl has a stethoscope draped around her neck. Stevens looks like a man smelling something that’s been rotting for a long time. He raises his hand.
The Major rolls his eyes and lets out an exasperated sigh. “What is it now, Stevens
?”
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” the doctor says, “but we’re stretched thin already. We’re doing our best.”
“What’s your point?”
The doctor gives him a shrug. “What is it you want from us?”
“I WANT YOUR GODDAMN OBEDIENCE!”
The booming response barely registers on Stevens’s thin, cunning features. Gavin takes long, even breaths, getting himself back under control. Stevens pushes his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose and looks away, shaking his head. Gavin gives his men a look.
The Guardsmen nod in unison at the Major, trigger fingers on trigger pads.
This isn’t going to be as easy as Gavin thought.
* * *
Brian Blake stands in the back of the room, in the shadow of a dusty, bankrupt vending machine, his hands in his pockets, listening, taking it all in. His heart thumps. And he hates himself for it. He feels like a laboratory rat in a maze. The crippling fear—an old nemesis—is back with a vengeance. He can feel the speed-loader like a tumor in his pocket, the bulge cold against his thigh. His throat is tight and dry, his tongue two sizes too big for his mouth. What the fuck is wrong with him?
At the front of the room, Gavin keeps pacing in front of the gallery of town founders displayed in shopworn frames across the room’s front wall. “Now, I don’t care what you call this cluster fuck we find ourselves in, I call it war … and right now, this little shit-heel town is officially under marshal-fucking-law.”
Tense murmurings spread through the group. The old man is the only one brazen enough to speak up. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Gavin walks over to the old man. “That means y’all are going to follow orders, be good little boys and girls.” He pats the top of the codger’s bald pate like he’s petting a rabbit. “Y’all behave yourselves, do what you’re told, and we just might survive this shit storm.”
The old man swallows hard. Most of his fellow townspeople look down at the floor. It’s clear to Brian, observing from the back of the room, that the inhabitants of Woodbury are trapped in more ways than one. The hatred in the room is thick enough to paint the walls. But the fear is thicker. It exudes from the very pores of everybody present, including Brian, who is hard at work fighting it. He shoves his terror back down his throat.
Somebody murmurs something near the front of the room, over by the window. Brian is too far away to make out the words, and he gazes over the tops of heads to see who it is.
“You got something you want to say, Detroit?”
Near the window, a middle-aged black man in greasy dungarees and gray beard is sulking in his seat, looking gloomily out the window. His long, tawny fingers are caked with axle grease. The town mechanic, a transplant from up North, he mumbles something to himself, not looking at the Major.
“Speak up, homeboy.” The Major approaches the black man. Towering over him, Gavin says, “What’s your beef? You don’t like the program?”
Almost inaudibly, the black man says, “I’m outta here.”
He gets up to make his exit, when suddenly the Major reaches for his gun.
With almost involuntary instinct, the black man reaches a big, callused hand down to the revolver shoved into his belt. But before he can draw the weapon or even give it a second thought, Gavin draws on him. “Please go for it, Detroit,” Gavin snarls, pointing the .45 at the man. “So I can blow the back of your nappy fuckin’ head off.”
The other soldiers move in behind the Major, raising their assault rifles, fixing their eyes on the black man.
Hand still on the hilt of his pistol, eyes locked with Gavin, the black man named Detroit murmurs, “It’s bad enough we gotta fight off them dead things … now we gotta deal with you pushin’ us around?”
“Sit. The fuck. Down. Now.” Gavin puts the barrel on Detroit’s forehead. “Or I will take you down. And that is a promise.”
With an exasperated sigh, Detroit flops back down.
“That goes for the rest of you!” The Major turns to the others. “You think I’m doin’ this for my health? You think I’m runnin’ for dog catcher? This ain’t no democracy. This is life and fucking death!” He begins pacing across the front of the room. “You want to keep from being dog food, you’ll do what you’re told. Let the professionals mind the store, and keep your fuckin’ pie holes shut!”
Silence hangs in the room like a poisonous gas. In back, Brian feels the skin on the back of his neck prickle. His heart is going to break through his sternum, it’s hammering so hard in his chest. He can’t breathe. He wants to rip this tin soldier’s head off but his body is going into some kind of fight-or-flight paralysis. His brain crackles with flickering fragments of memory, sights and sounds from a lifetime driven by fear, avoiding bullies on the playground at Burke County Elementary, skirting the parking lot of the Stop-and-Go to avoid a group of leather thugs, running away from a gang of toughs at a Kid Rock concert, wondering where Philip is … where the hell is Philip when you need him …
A noise from the front of the room shakes Brian out of his rumination.
The man named Detroit is getting up. He’s had enough. His chair squeaks as he rises to his full height—well over six feet—and turns to walk away.
“Where the hell are you going?” Gavin watches the black man move down the aisle toward the front exit. “HEY! I ASKED YOU A QUESTION, DETROIT! WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING!”
Detroit doesn’t even look back, he just waves dismissively, mumbling, “I’m outta here … good luck, y’all … you’re gonna need it with these motherfuckers.”
“YOU SIT YOUR BLACK ASS BACK DOWN RIGHT NOW OR I WILL BLOW YOU AWAY!”
Detroit keeps walking.
Gavin pulls his sidearm.
There is an audible intake of air among the townspeople as Gavin draws a bead on the back of Detroit’s head.
The blast sucks the air out of the room—so loud, it rattles the walls, accompanied by a scream from one of the older women—as a single round goes into the back of the black man’s skull. Detroit is thrown forward into the vending machine next to Brian. Brian jerks. The black man bounces off the steel panel and then folds to the floor, his blood spray-painting the Coke display, the wall above the machine, and even part of the ceiling.
* * *
Many things happen in the aftermath of that blast, even before the ringing echoes of screams have had a chance to fade away. Almost immediately, three separate townspeople—two middle-aged men, and a woman in her thirties—dart toward the exit, and Brian watches as if in a dream, his ears ringing, his eyes flash-blind. He can barely hear the strangely calm voice of Major Gavin—void of regret, void of any feeling whatsoever—ordering his two Guardsmen—Barker and Manning—to go get the fleeing townspeople, and while they’re at it, round up anyone else who’s “still out there hiding like goddamn cockroaches,” because Gavin wants every soul who’s still got a pulse to hear what he has to say. The two Guardsmen hurry out of the room, leaving behind the stunned, petrified group of twenty-five residents, the Major … and Brian.
The room seems to turn on its axis for Brian as Gavin holsters his gun, looking down at the body of the black man sprawled on the floor as though it was a hunting trophy. Gavin turns and saunters back toward the front. He’s got everybody’s attention now like never before, and he seems to be enjoying every minute of it. Brian can barely hear the Major droning on now about making an example out of any cocksucker who thinks they can endanger the lives of Woodbury’s residents by being a lone wolf, by bucking the system, by being a smart-ass know-it-all who thinks they can go it alone and keep their shit to themselves. These times, according to Gavin, are special times. Foretold in the Bible. Prophesied. Matter of fact, these times are maybe, just maybe, the end-time. And from now on, every last son of a bitch in this town needs to get used to the fact that this may very well be the last battle between man and Satan, and as far as the fine folks of Woodbury, Georgia, are concerned, Gavin has been hereby appointed, b
y default, the goddamn Messiah.
This maniacal lecture lasts for perhaps a minute—maybe two minutes at the most—but in that brief span of time, Brian Blake goes through a metamorphosis.
Frozen against the side of the vending machine, the fallen man’s blood seeping under the soles of his shoes, Brian realizes he will have no chance in this world if he lets his natural inclinations drag him down. Brian’s instincts—to shrink away from violence, to skirt dangers, to avoid confrontation—fill him with shame, and he finds himself casting his racing thoughts back to the very first encounter he had with the walking dead, back in Deering, at his parents’ place, a million light-years away. They came out of the toolshed in back, and Brian was trying to talk to them, reason with them, warning them to stay away, throwing stones at them, running back into the house, boarding up windows, pissing his pants, behaving like the weakling he always was and always will be. And in the space of that single terrible instant—as Gavin pontificates to the townspeople—Brian is gripped with a flickering flash-frame series of visions of his cowardice and indecision along the road to western Georgia, as if he’d learned nothing along the way: huddling in the closet at Wiltshire Estates, bagging his first zombie almost by accident in the Chalmerses’ building, bellyaching to his brother about this and that, always weak and scared and useless. Brian realizes suddenly—with the convulsive pain of an embolism exploding in his heart—that there is no way he can survive on his own. No way in hell. And now, as Major Gavin starts barking orders at the traumatized residents from the front of the council room, assigning arduous duties and rules and procedures, Brian feels his consciousness disconnecting, detaching from his body like a butterfly leaving its cocoon. It starts with Brian wishing that Philip were there to protect him, as he’d done since the beginning of the ordeal. How would Philip handle Gavin? What would Philip do? Soon, this simple longing transforms into agonizing pain and loss over Philip’s death—the torture like an open wound—the sharp edge of grief slicing through Brian and tearing him in two. Bracing himself against that blood-spattered vending machine, Brian feels his center of gravity rising, his spirit breaking away from his body, like a primordial chunk of the earth tearing away to form the moon. Dizziness threatens to drive him to the floor but he fights it, and before he can even register what is going on, Brian has risen out of his body. His consciousness now floats above his body, a ghostly onlooker, gazing down at himself in that airless, reeking, crowded community room in the old Woodbury courthouse.
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