“You gotta be kidding me. All we been through? And I don’t even know you?”
“Josh, that’s not what I—”
“You’re putting me on the same level as Bob and the stoner? Megan and them folks at the camp? Bingham?”
“Josh—”
“All them things you said to me this week—what are you saying?—you been lying? You said them things just to make me feel better?”
“I meant what I said,” she murmurs softly. The guilt twists in her. For a brief instant she thinks back to that terrible moment she lost little Sarah Bingham, the undead swarming all over the little girl on those godforsaken grounds outside the circus tent. The helplessness. The paralytic terror that seized Lilly that day. The loss and the grief and the sorrow as deep as a well. The fact is, Josh is correct. Lilly has said things to him in the throes of late-night lovemaking that aren’t exactly true. On some level she loves him, cares for him, has strong feelings … but she’s projecting something sick deep within her, something that has to do with fear.
“That’s just fine and dandy,” Josh Lee Hamilton says finally, shaking his head.
They are approaching the gap in the wall outside town. The entranceway—a wide spot between two uncompleted sections of barricade—has a wooden gate secured at one end with cable. About fifty yards away, a single guard sits on the roof of a semitrailer, gazing in the opposite direction with an M1 carbine on his hip.
Josh marches up to the gate and angrily loosens the cable, throwing it open. The rattling noise echoes. Lilly’s flesh crawls with panic. She whispers, “Josh, be careful, they’re gonna hear us.”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass,” he says, swinging the gate open for her. “Ain’t a prison. They can’t keep us from comin’ and goin’.”
She follows him through the gate and down a side road toward Main Street.
Few stragglers walk the streets at this hour. Most of the denizens of Woodbury are tucked away indoors, having dinner or drinking themselves into oblivion. The generators provide an eerie thrum behind the walls of the racetrack, some of the overhead stadium lights flickering. The wind trumpets through the bare trees of the square, and dead leaves skitter down the sidewalks.
“You have it your way,” Josh says as they turn right and head east down Main Street, trudging toward their apartment building. “We’ll just be fuck buddies. Quick pop every now and then to relieve the tension. No muss, no fuss…”
“Josh, that’s not—”
“You could get the same thing from a bottle of rotgut and a vibrator … but hey. Warm body’s nice every now and then, right?”
“Josh, c’mon. Why does it have to be this way? I’m just trying to—”
“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” He bites down on his words as they approach the food center.
A cluster of men gather around the front of the store, warming their hands over a flaming brazier of trash burning in an oil drum. Sam the Butcher is there, a ratty overcoat covering his blood-spackled apron. His gaunt face puckers with distaste, his diamond-chip blue eyes narrowing as he sees the two figures approaching from the west.
“Fine, Josh, whatever.” Lilly thrusts her hands deeper into her pockets as she strides alongside the big man, slowly shaking her head. “Whatever you say.”
They pass the food center.
“Hey! Green Mile!” Sam the Butcher’s voice calls out, flinty, terse, a knife scraping a whetstone. “C’mere a minute, big fella.”
Lilly pauses, her hackles up.
Josh walks over to the men. “I got a name,” he says flatly.
“Well, excuse the hell outta me,” the butcher says. “What was it—Hamilburg? Hammington?”
“Hamilton.”
The butcher offers a vacuous smile. “Well, well. Mr. Hamilton. Esquire. Might I have a moment of your valuable time, if you aren’t too busy?”
“What do you want?”
The butcher’s cold smile remains. “Just outta curiosity, what’s in the bag?”
Josh stares at him. “Nothing much … just some odds and ends.”
“Odds and ends, huh? What kind of odds and ends?”
“Things we found along the way. Nothin’ that would interest anybody.”
“You do realize you ain’t covered your debt on them other odds and ends I gave y’all couple days ago.”
“What are you talking about?” Josh keeps staring. “I’ve been on the crew every day this week.”
“You ain’t covered it yet, son. That heating oil don’t grow on trees.”
“You said forty hours would cover it.”
The butcher shrugs. “You misunderstood me, hoss. It happens.”
“How so?”
“I said forty hours on top of what you logged already. Got that?”
The staring match goes on for an awkward moment. All conversation around the flaming trash barrel ceases. All eyes are on the two men. Something about the way Josh’s beefy shoulder blades are tensing under his lumberjack coat makes Lilly’s flesh crawl.
Josh finally gives the man a shrug. “I’ll keep on workin’, then.”
Sam the Butcher tilts his lean, chiseled face toward the duffel bag. “And I’ll thank you to hand over whatever you got tucked away in that bag for the cause.”
The butcher makes a move toward the duffel bag, reaching out for it.
Josh snaps it back and away from his grasp.
The mood changes with the speed of a circuit firing. The other men—mostly older loafers with hound-dog eyes and stringy gray hair in their faces—begin to instinctively back away. The tension ratchets up. The silence only adds to the latent violence brewing—the soft snapping of the fire the only sound beneath the wind.
“Josh, it’s okay.” Lilly steps forward and attempts to intercede. “We don’t need any—”
“No!” Josh jerks the duffel away from her, his gaze never leaving the dark, bloodshot eyes of the butcher. “Nobody’s taking this bag!”
The butcher’s voice drops an octave, going all slippery and dark. “You better think long and hard about fucking with me, big boy.”
“The thing is, I’m not fucking with you,” Josh says to the man in the bloody apron. “Just stating a fact. The stuff in this bag is ours fair and square. And nobody’s taking it from us.”
“Finders keepers?”
“That’s right.”
The old men back away farther until it feels to Lilly like she’s standing in some flickering, ice-cold fighting ring with two cornered animals. She gropes for some way to ease back the tension but her words get stuck in her throat. She reaches for Josh’s shoulder but he pulls away from her as though shocked. The butcher flicks his gaze at Lilly. “You better tell your beau here he’s making the mistake of his life.”
“Leave her out of this,” Josh tells him. “This is between you and me.”
The butcher sucks the inside of his cheek thoughtfully. “Tell you what … I’m a fair man … I’ll give you one more chance. Hand over the goodies and I’ll wipe the debt clean. We’ll pretend this little tiff never happened.” Something approximating a smile creases the lines around the butcher’s weathered face. “Life’s too short. Know what I mean? Especially around here.”
“C’mon, Lilly,” Josh says without moving his gaze from the butcher’s lifeless eyes. “We got better things to do, stand around here flapping our jaws.”
Josh turns away from the storefront and starts down the street.
The butcher goes after the duffel. “GIVE ME THAT GODDAMN BAG!”
Lilly jerks forward as the two men come together in the middle of the street.
“JOSH, NO!”
The big man spins and drives the brunt of his shoulder into the butcher’s chest. The move is sudden and violent, and harkens back to Josh’s gridiron years when he would clear the field for a running back. The man in the blood-stippled apron flings backward, his breath gasping out of him. He trips over his own feet and goes down hard on his ass, blinking wit
h shock and outrage.
Josh turns and continues on down the street, calling over his shoulder. “Lilly, I said c’mon, let’s go!”
Lilly doesn’t see the butcher suddenly contorting his body against the ground, struggling to dig something out of the back of his belt under his apron. Lilly doesn’t see the glint of blue steel filling the butcher’s hand, nor does she hear the telltale snap of a safety being thumbed off a semiautomatic, nor does she see the madness in the butcher’s eyes, until it’s too late.
“Josh, wait!”
Lilly gets halfway down the sidewalk—coming to within ten feet of Josh—when the blast cracks open the sky, the roar of the 9-millimeter so tremendous it seems to rattle the windows half a block down the street. Lilly instinctively dives for cover, hitting the macadam hard, the impact knocking the breath out of her.
She finds her voice then, and she shrieks as a flock of pigeons erupts off the roof of the food center—the swarm of carrion birds spreading across the darkening sky like black needlepoint.
TWELVE
Lilly Caul would remember things about that day for the rest of her life. She would remember seeing the red rosette of blood and tissue—like a tuft in upholstery—blooming from the back of Josh Lee Hamilton’s head, the wound appearing a nanosecond before the booming report of the 9-millimeter Glock fully registered in Lilly’s ears. She would remember tripping and falling to the pavement six feet behind Josh, one of her molars cracking, another incisor biting through her tongue. She would remember her ears ringing then, a fine spangle of blood droplets on the backs of her hands and lower arms.
But most of all, Lilly would remember the sight of Josh Lee Hamilton folding to the street as though he were swooning, his enormous legs going soft and wobbly like those of a rag doll. That was perhaps the strangest part: The way the giant man seemed to instantly lose his substance. One would expect such a person to not easily give up the ghost, to fall like a great redwood or old landmark building under the wrecking ball, literally shaking the earth on impact. But the fact is, that day, in the waning blue winter light, Josh Lee Hamilton would fade out without even a whimper.
He would simply keel over and land in a silent heap on the cold pavement.
* * *
In the immediate aftermath Lilly feels her entire body seize up with chills, gooseflesh pouring down over her flesh, everything going blurry and also crystal clear at the same time, as though her spirit were separating from her earthbound self. She loses control of her actions. She finds herself rising to her feet without even being aware of it.
She finds herself moving toward the fallen man with numb, involuntary steps, the strides of an automaton. “No, wait … no, no, wait, wait, wait,” she gibbers as she approaches the dying giant. Her knees hit the ground. Her tears run across the front of her as she reaches down and cradles his huge head and babbles, “Somebody … get a doctor … no … get … somebody … get a … GET A FUCKING DOCTOR, SOMEBODY!!”
Nestled in Lilly’s hands, the blood getting on her sleeves, Josh’s face twitches in its death throes, seeming to undulate and pass from one expression to another. His eyes rolling back, he blinks his last blinks, somehow finding Lilly’s face and locking on to it with his final spark of life. “Alicia … close the window.”
A synapse fires, a memory of an older sister fading away in his traumatized brain like a dying ember.
“Alicia, close the…”
His face grows still, eyes freezing and hardening in their sockets like marbles.
“Josh, Josh…” Lilly shakes him as though trying to kick-start an engine back to life. He’s gone. She cannot see through her tears, everything going milky. She feels the wetness on her wrists from his breached skull, and she feels something tightening around the nape of her neck.
“Leave him be,” a gravelly voice intones from behind her, thick with rage.
Lilly realizes someone is pulling her away from the body, a large male hand, fingers clutching a hank of her collar, tugging her back.
Something deep within her snaps.
* * *
The passage of time seems to elongate and corrupt, like that of a dream, as the butcher yanks the girl away from the body. He drags her back against the curb and she flops against the barrier, banging the back of her head, lying still now, staring up at the lanky man in the apron. The butcher stands over her, breathing hard, shaking with adrenaline. Behind him, the old geezers stand back against the storefront, shrinking into their baggy, ragged clothes, their rheumy eyes pinned wide.
Down the block, others materialize in the twilight, peering out of doorways and around corners.
“Look what you two have gone and done now!” the butcher accuses Lilly, shoving the pistol in her face. “I tried to be reasonable!”
“Get it over with.” She closes her eyes. “Get it over with … go ahead.”
“You stupid bitch, I ain’t gonna kill ya!” He slaps her with his free hand. “Are you listening? Do I have your attention?”
Footsteps echo in the distance—someone running this way—which goes unheard at first. Lilly opens her eyes. “You’re a murderer.” She utters this over bloody teeth. Her nose is bleeding. “You’re worse than a fucking walker.”
“That’s your opinion.” He slaps her again. “Now I want you to listen to me.”
The sting is bracing to Lilly. It wakes her up. “What do you want?”
Voices call out a block away, the charging footsteps closing in, but the butcher doesn’t hear anything but his own voice. “Gonna take the rest of Green Mile’s debt from you, little sister.”
“Fuck you.”
The butcher leans down and grabs her by the scruff of her jacket collar. “You’re gonna work that skinny little ass until you’re—”
Lilly’s knee comes up hard enough to drive the man’s testicles up into his pelvic bone. The butcher staggers and lets out a startled gasp that sounds like steam escaping from a broken vent.
Lilly springs to her feet, and she claws at the butcher’s face. Her nails are chewed to the quicks, so they don’t do much damage, but it drives the man back farther. He swings at her. She flinches away from the blow, which grazes her shoulder. She kicks him in the balls again.
The butcher staggers, reaching for his pistol.
* * *
By this point, Martinez is half a block away, running toward the scene, followed by two of his guards. He calls out, “WHAT THE FUCK?”
The butcher has gotten his Glock out of his belt and spins toward the oncoming men.
The burly, coiled Martinez pounces immediately, slamming the butt end of his M1 down on the butcher’s right wrist, the sound of delicate bones crunching audible above the wind. The Glock flies out of the butcher’s hand and the butcher lets out a mucusy howl.
One of the other guards—a black kid in an oversized hoodie—arrives in time to grab Lilly, pulling her away from the action. She writhes and squirms in the young man’s arms as the guard holds her at bay.
“Stand down, asshole!” Martinez booms, pointing the assault rifle at the staggering butcher, but almost instantly, before Martinez can react, the butcher gets his hands around the shaft of the carbine.
The two men grapple for the gun, their inertia driving them back into the flaming barrel. The barrel spills its contents, a swirl of sparks going up, as the twosome careens toward the storefront. The butcher slams Martinez into the glass door, glass cracking in hairline fractures as Martinez slams the gun up into the butcher’s face.
The butcher rears back in pain, clawing the M1 out of Martinez’s grip. The assault rifle flies off across the sidewalk. The old men scatter in terror, while other townspeople arrive from all directions, some of them already sending up a frenzy of angry shouts. The second guard—an older man in aviator glasses and ratty down vest—holds the crowd back.
Martinez delivers a hard right to the butcher’s jaw and sends the man in the apron crashing through the broken glass pane of the door.
Th
e butcher lands inside the store’s vestibule, sprawling to the tile floor, which is littered with glass shards now. Martinez climbs in after him.
A barrage of punishing blows from Martinez keeps the butcher pinned to the floor, his spittle and blood flinging off in pink threads. Frantically shielding his face, flailing impotently, the butcher tries to fight back but Martinez overpowers the man.
The final blow—a roundhouse punch to the butcher’s jaw—knocks the man unconscious.
An awkward moment of silence follows, as Martinez catches his breath. He stands over the man in the apron, rubbing his knuckles, trying to get his bearings. The noise of the crowd outside the food center has grown to a dull roar—most of them cheering for Martinez—like a demented pep rally.
Martinez cannot figure out what just happened. He never much cared for Sam the Butcher, but on the other hand he cannot imagine what would have gotten into this prick to make him draw on Hamilton.
“What the fuck got into you?” Martinez asks the man on the floor, speaking somewhat rhetorically, not really expecting an answer.
“The man obviously wants to be a star.”
The voice comes from the gaping, jagged entrance behind Martinez.
Martinez whirls and sees the Governor standing in the doorway. Sinewy arms crossed against his chest, the long tails of his duster flapping in the breeze, the man has an enigmatic expression on his face, a mixture of bemusement and contempt and baleful curiosity. Gabe and Bruce stand behind the man like sullen totems.
Martinez is more confused than ever. “He wants to be a what?”
The Governor’s expression transforms—his dark eyes glittering with inspiration, his handlebar mustache fully grown in now and twitching around the corners of a frown—which tells Martinez to step lightly. “First,” the Governor says in a flat, impassive tone, “tell me exactly what happened.”
* * *
“He didn’t suffer, Lilly … remember that … no pain … he just went out like a light.” Bob crouches near the curb next to Lilly, who is slumped with her head down, the tears dripping onto her lap. Bob has his first-aid kit open on the sidewalk next to her, and he is dabbing a swab of iodine on her cut face. “That’s more than most of us can hope for in this shithole of a world.”
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