Lilly looks down at her withered arms, the constellations of red marks from the various IV sticks administered to her, signs of the relentless harvesting of her blood. Her head pounds. She can’t get a full breath, and her body still feels like it weighs a ton. “How much blood did you take from me, anyway?”
“We were very careful, I assure you. We kept you nourished with glucose, electrolytes, nutrients, amino acids. There was never any—”
“How much exactly?”
The chemist looks down. “We took four pints over the course of … a month.”
Her scalp crawls with dread. “Jesus Christ.”
“I realize that sounds like a lot, but you’ve been monitored closely.”
“Never mind. Doesn’t matter. None of it fucking matters anymore.”
“If I may be so bold as to disagree … respectfully … only one thing matters.”
She looks at him. “And that would be?”
He taps the portfolio with a misshapen arthritic finger. “The vaccine.”
She keeps her gaze fixed on his eyes. “How do I know there is one? How do I know there ever will be a vaccine?”
He swallows. “In these uncertain times, one must choose to trust or one is lost.”
She lets out a sigh. “I’m not lost, I know exactly where I am.”
He nods, and then his eyes soften, his jowls settling into an expression of sadness. “Young lady, I know I’ve been responsible for the deaths of innocent people. But we have an opportunity here—if we can get out of here with our skin intact, we can complete the trials. There’s no guarantee the vaccine will work. But isn’t it worth trying? I’m asking you to trust me. I have no right to ask this of you. But remember, I did hold up my end of the bargain with the children. I’m asking you, Lilly. Trust me. Please.”
Lilly thinks it over, her head throbbing. She notices a full-length mirror across the room, next to an old antique armoire, and she sees her reflection, a pale rag doll clad in a threadbare hospital smock. She stands there for a moment, staring at her shriveled cadaver of a body … and then she notices her face. She hasn’t yet seen a reflection of her face since her awakening. Now she gapes at the ghastly evidence. The face staring back at her has sunken cheeks, eyes rimmed in dark circles, ashy white skin, and dull, greasy hair that has grown so long and stringy that half of it dangles down the front of her, half hanging limply down the small of her back. Her guts clench, and it takes her a while to manage a response. “You couldn’t have taken four pints of whole blood in a month,” she says in a low, doom-laden voice. “I’ve donated enough times in my life to know you have to recover between donations.”
The old man says nothing. He looks down and waits for her to solve the equation.
Lilly looks at the chemist. “Doc, look at me. How long have I been in this room?”
“It doesn’t—”
“YES IT DOES MATTER! HOW. FUCKING. LONG.”
The old man takes a deep breath and exhales in a long, crackling wheeze. “At the end of this month, you would be celebrating your six-month anniversary here at this fine institution.”
* * *
For the longest moment, the old man is convinced that Lilly is about to attack him—probably with mortal consequences this time—and who would blame her? Raymond Nalls has played all his cards, has cashed in all his chips, and has reached the end of his role in this great and terrifying drama. Head drooping, eyes cast down at the floor, he waits for the woman to put him out of his misery. Will she strangle him? Will she beat him to death? Will she throw him out the door into the fray of the swarm?
He remembers the old adage that your life passes before you at the time of your death, and he wonders why he’s not seeing bittersweet tableaus from his early days in Richmond on his father’s farm, or his time at the University of Virginia medical school, falling in love with Violet Simms at the Debutant Ball, and starting their brood in Norfolk. He wonders why he’s not seeing images of the plague, the early days of his journey in search of a facility, the struggle to develop an antidote. Shouldn’t he be glimpsing flashes of hooking up with Bryce’s militia as his caravan of ragtag medicos heads in a southwesterly direction—a couple of arduous miles each day—searching for the perfect medical center to begin the human trials? Nalls can’t even remember when he was first stricken with the epiphany of how he would save the world … or how his soul got lost in the process. But now it’s all crumbling before his very eyes.
An awkward moment passes as the woman continues to stare at the mirror, pondering her reflection, looking as though she might break down and cry at any moment. Nalls studies her for quite a long time. There’s something about this woman that Nalls can’t quite fathom. There’s a strength underneath the surface of her casual, scruffy, bohemian manner. She has a certain gravitas that Nalls can’t quite put his finger on but it’s powerful nonetheless. Maybe she’ll refrain from killing him, at least for the moment.
Nalls notices the woman shifting her gaze from the mirror to the door as the rising din of unholy hunger reverberates out in the hallway, vibrating the very foundation of the floor. Then the woman turns and glances at the window on the opposite wall of the room, shaded by wood-grain venetian blinds, rattling softly with each gust of wind outside. And Nalls immediately knows what she’s thinking. “If I may make a suggestion?” He asks this softly, tentatively, testing the unsettled waters of her anger.
She looks at him. “I’m listening.”
He leads her over to the window and pulls back one side of the blinds.
Through the grimy glass, the skyline of postplague Atlanta is visible, stretching into the distance, the cathedrals of derelict skyscrapers, the spires of scorched, weathered towers as empty as the husks of dead beehives. Nalls waits for Lilly to notice the edge of the platform.
She looks down below and regards the maze-like patterns of streets now inundated with the dead. In the six months that Lilly has been in her induced coma, the walker population in the fallen city has increased tenfold. Now the very pavement is obscured by wall-to-wall hordes squeezing into every square foot of the urban landscape. They crowd sidewalks and press into vestibules and mill about aimlessly across storefronts and under bus stop shelters. Even from this height, the thick, oily meat-rot odor wafts on the wind, swirls and eddies like one vast monolithic entity. “What am I supposed to be looking at?” Lilly finally mutters.
“Very possibly the only way out of this facility.” The chemist points at the edge of a wooden deck suspended by metal cables, swaying in the wind, thumping against the side of the building. Lilly stares at it for a moment, cocking her head as though not yet comprehending the purpose of the thing dangling there on its tethers. Only a portion of the object is within view from this angle. A filthy plastic bucket and a coil of rope are clearly visible, sitting on the corner of the platform where somebody left them years earlier.
The painter’s scaffold.
Lilly swallows hard, then turns to Nalls and says, “Do you remember what you did with my clothes and my weapons?”
* * *
Minutes later, in a battered locker across the room, Nalls finds Lilly’s personal belongings—which amount to her rucksack, tattered jeans, bra, a denim jacket, Doc Martens boots, and the same tactical knife she had held to the old man’s neck six months ago in their standoff—and he brings them to her in a plastic bag. Meanwhile, she finds a roll of duct tape and a first-aid kit. The noises outside the door are constant now, the vibrations from the dead swarming the corridor, sending motes of dust sifting down from the lintel.
She needs to pack a water bottle—they’ll die without it—but when she checks the dispenser across the room, she finds it empty. She throws an angry glance over her shoulder at the old man, who stands clutching his portfolio and looking sheepish and nervous. She keeps her voice steady, cool and collected. “What’s the firearm situation?”
He frowns. “Meaning what? Bryce’s little armory is on the first floor.” A thud outside th
e door makes the old man jump. He swallows. “I highly doubt we’d be able to retrieve any of those weapons.”
“Nothing in this room in the way of guns?”
“I don’t recall—”
“Think!” She shoves the roll of tape into the rucksack. “Think, Doc!—Think!”
He looks around the room. Another thud from outside the door sends dust down from the top of the armoire. He licks his lips nervously.
“The clock’s ticking, Doc. C’mon.” Lilly sees the armoire trembling, the sound of the door rattling, the pressure straining the hinges. She shoots a look at Nalls. “More than twenty walkers can overturn a small truck.” She nods at the barricaded door. “There must be hundreds now out in that hallway.”
“All right … um … the top drawer possibly.” He points at the desk.
She hurries over to the cluttered corner. Her legs are improving with each passing minute, her arms regaining some of their strength. The dizziness has subsided somewhat. Her stomach turns and roils as she throws open the drawer. “Here we go,” she says after uncovering the snub-nosed .38-caliber police special from a stack of forms, rubber bands, and ancient ballpoint pens. She holds it up, thumbs open the cylinder, and makes note of the six bullets tucked into the wheel. She snaps it shut. “It’s not exactly a howitzer but it’s better than nothing.”
The old man looks down. “I almost forgot I had that. Kept it on hand for … personal reasons.”
“What does that mean?” She fishes around the drawer for ammunition.
His voice softens. “In case I needed to … bring about an end to my own journey before … well … you know the rest.”
She finds a small carton of .38-caliber rounds, so old the lettering has begun to fade. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
She sets the revolver and the box of ammo on the desktop and hurriedly dresses as the shifting and thudding noises intensify out in the hall and the door’s hinges creak. The old man looks away chastely as Lilly quickly steps out of her smock, revealing her nude, malnourished body. Her ribs poke through her skin like tent poles, legs and armpits lush with hair from her months in drugged limbo. She shows no sign of modesty or embarrassment as she steps into her jeans, quickly yanking them on, and then hastily pulling on the rest of her clothes. She tapes her pant cuffs to her boots, winding several layers, as the door threatens to burst open at any minute. She stuffs her provisions into her satchel and straps it on, tightening its buckles so securely that a tornado couldn’t blow the thing loose. She raises the collar of her jacket and winds tape around it, creating a thick layer of protection around the tender territory of her neck.
Then she kneels in front of the old man and tapes his trouser bottoms to his ankles, winding so much tape it starts to look as though he’s wearing spats.
The chemist clears his throat, clutching the portfolio tighter. “Unfortunately, that window is double-paned reinforced safety glass.” His voice is laden with doubt. He jerks at another thudding noise behind him, this one so loud it’s accompanied by the sound of wood splitting. “It would take that howitzer you mentioned to break it open.”
She finishes fortifying the sleeves of his bloody lab coat. “Maybe,” she says, stuffing the tape back in her satchel. “Maybe not.” She pulls the gun, spins the chamber, and thumbs back the hammer. “Stand clear, Doc.”
Nalls backs toward the barricaded door. Clasping the portfolio, swallowing air, eyes shifting nervously, he watches Lilly yank the venetian blinds off their moorings. The louvers tumble to the floor with a loud crash, revealing the filthy glass. Diffuse light pours into the room from the ashen sky outside. Only inches from the door now, blinking, jerking at the muffled thuds behind him, the old man braces himself as Lilly aims point-blank at the glass.
“Here goes,” she mutters, turning her face away and squeezing off a shot.
The booming report of the .38 pierces the air, making Nalls practically jump out of his skin. The blast chews a chunk out of the glass, sending a million hairline fractures like a halo around the hole. Wind whistles through the puncture but the window holds.
Behind Nalls, the armoire shifts on the floor, the door’s hinges giving way.
“Fuck—FUCK!” Lilly shoves the gun into her belt and kicks the window—once, twice, three times. The glass cracks some more but still holds.
Across the room, Nalls points a palsied finger at the floor. “Perhaps if you try the—”
Behind him, the hinges hang by threads now, the door creaking open a few more inches, the armoire sliding across the tiles, the clamor and stench of the swarm filling the room. An arm thrusts into the office, dead fingers clawing at the air. Before Nalls can even jerk away, a second arm plunges in, reaching for him, the cold gray fingers hooking onto the back of his lab coat. He lets out a yowl.
Lilly sees this at the exact moment she also notices the object that Nalls had started to indicate a few seconds earlier—on the floor near the gurney, the overturned metal IV stand—and Lilly moves on pure instinct. In one painful, leaping stride, she lunges across the room and scoops up the stand. The metal apparatus is long, bulky, and awkward—with its tripod on one end and its bag hook on the other—but adrenaline now surges through Lilly, spurring her on, driving her across the room to where the old man wrestles with his coattails as more arms push into the room, a livid face behind one of them chomping with the fervor of a rabid dog. Nalls lets out a grunt of agony as he shrugs off his lab coat. The coat is ripped apart in one great, heaving rupture, leaving it in shreds in the clutches of dead fingers. The old man somehow manages to hold on to his portfolio as he staggers backward, momentarily dazed and insensate.
“GET BEHIND ME!”
Lilly’s roar brings the chemist back to his senses. Now clad only in a yellowed undershirt, his gray chest hair blooming out the top of the collar, he grips the leather portfolio in his shriveled arms and does what he’s told as a contingent of dead push their way into the office. Lilly shoves the old man toward the window. She turns and sees something huge coming toward her.
The first biter to shamble into the room is the same large male that she saw earlier outside the door, the one clad in the shredded Kevlar vest with the livid, veiny face of a cadaver and eyes as milky and opaque as old porcelain. The thing that was once Army Sergeant Beau Bryce now drags toward Lilly with alarming speed, the arm that once featured a large hand adorned with a signet ring now a ragged, bloodless stump. The thing makes a feral, wet noise as it reaches for Lilly with both its stump and surviving fingers.
Lilly drives the sharp end of the IV stand through the thing’s nasal cavity.
Black fluid bubbles from the wound and runs down the shaft of the stand, the massive creature going limp. Lilly lets out a grunt of exertion as the monster sags on the end of the pole, still impaled on the makeshift harpoon. Lilly swings the dead weight toward the other creatures now pouring into the office, knocking over Louis XIV end tables and sending documents skittering across the floor. The thing that was once Beau Bryce bowls over a half dozen smaller creatures, sending them tumbling.
Lilly yanks the stand from Bryce’s skull, a fountain of greasy matter spewing like dirty sea foam. Lilly screams, “NALLS! GET READY!”
Across the room, near the double panes of grimy safety glass, the old chemist gets the message immediately and crouches down, covering his head with the portfolio. Lilly lunges toward the window, raising the six-foot-long metal stand as though it were a javelin. She drives it as hard as she can into the weak spot in the center of the window, the tip piercing the crater in the middle. The window holds miraculously, stubbornly, maddeningly. Behind her, the swarm pushes its way through the doorway and floods the former administrative office in a miasma of noise and stench, overturning furniture, banging into each other, lurching toward the humans on the opposite side of the room.
Lilly lets out a primal wail of effort as she levers the stand hard into the weak spot.
The glass collapses, a gust of wind bl
owing a nimbus of deadly, diamond-edged granules into the room, some of the particles spitting in Lilly’s face before she has a chance to turn away. She shakes it off and grabs the old man by the nape of his undershirt. “C’mon!—You first!—C’mon now!—You can do it!—NOW—NOW-NOW-NOW!”
The chemist rises up, bats away some the sharper splinters of glass with his leather satchel, and hooks the strap around his hand. Then he awkwardly climbs outside into the wind and noise of the fifth-floor precipice.
Lilly wastes no time following him. Behind her, the swarm closes in. Only inches away from their clutches, she barely gets her leg up and over the windowsill before one of the monsters hooks a clawlike hand around her left ankle. She stiffens, then kicks out with her Doc Marten as hard as she can. Her steel-reinforced toe catches the owner of the hand square in the face, and Lilly feels something crunch beneath the welt of her jackboot.
She pulls herself free and shimmies the rest of the way out the window.
At that moment, for most of the creatures dragging across the room, the humans might as well have magically disappeared in a puff of smoke.
* * *
Climbing onto the scaffold turns out to be easier that Lilly thought—despite the fact that the platform hangs in front of the adjacent room to the south, not to mention the issue of the wind buffeting it constantly, every few moments banging it against the building. The base of the contraption stretches at least twenty feet lengthwise, as well as three feet deep, the overhang on the north side providing an easy hop from the office windowsill. Even the old man climbs onto the shelf with a minimum of fuss, still clutching his beloved leather-bound portfolio. Clambering aboard the wooden deck, Lilly is amazed that Nalls is barely winded. She never asked his age, but she can tell he’s well into his seventies. For a man of that age to maneuver such a step impresses her. Of course, at that point, she never would have guessed that making it to the scaffold from the ledge of the office window would be the least of their problems. But she learns quickly—once she discovers the pulley system rigged to the sides of the platform—that lowering themselves to ground level may very well be their undoing.
The Walking Dead: Search and Destroy Page 20