The clang rings out. The children inside the car jerk with a start. The livid blue faces of the dead turn toward the noise.
“C’MON! C’MON!!” Lilly lunges away from the Chrysler, moving toward the nearest car lined up in the haphazard row of vehicles—a beat-up Ford Taurus with one window covered in cardboard—and she strikes the edge of the roof as hard as she can, making another harsh metallic clang that gets the attention of more of the dead.
Lilly darts toward the next car in line. She bangs the scoop against the front left quarter panel, issuing another dull clang.
“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!!”
Lilly’s voice rises above the clamor like the bark of a sick animal, stretched thin with horror, hoarse with trauma, toneless, a touch of madness in it. She slams the shovel against car after car, not really knowing exactly what she’s doing, not really in control of her actions anymore. More zombies take notice, their lazy, awkward movements drawn to the noise.
It takes Lilly mere seconds to reach the end of the row of vehicles, slamming the shovel into the last vehicle—a rust-pocked Chevy S-10 pickup—but by that point, most of the assailants have latched on to her clarion call, and now slowly, stupidly, clumsily wander toward the sound of her traumatized shouts.
The only walkers that remain are the six that continue to devour Sarah Bingham on the ground in the clearing by the great, billowing circus tent.
* * *
“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MONNNNN!!!!!” Lilly vaults across the gravel road and dashes up the hill toward the tree line.
Pulse racing, vision blurred, lungs heaving for air, she drops the shovel and digs her hiking boots into the mire as she ascends the soft forest floor. She plunges into the trees. Her shoulder bangs against the trunk of an ancient birch, the pain flaring in her skull, stars shooting across her line of vision. She moves instinctively now, a horde of zombies coming up the rise behind her.
Zigzagging through the deeper woods, she loses her sense of direction. Behind her, the pack of walkers has slowed and lost her scent.
Time loses all meaning. As though in a dream, Lilly feels motion slow down, her screams refusing to come out, her legs bogging down in the invisible quicksand of nightmares. The darkness closes in as the forest thickens and deepens.
Lilly thinks of Sarah, poor Sarah, in her sweet little pink angora sweater, now bathed in her own blood, and the tragedy drags Lilly down, yanking her off her feet and throwing her down to the soft floor of matted pine needles and decaying matter and endless cycles of death and regeneration. Lilly lets out a paroxysm of pain on a breathless sob, her tears rolling down her cheeks and moistening the humus.
Her weeping—heard by no one—goes on for quite some time.
* * *
The search party finds Lilly late that afternoon. Led by Chad Bingham, the group of five men and three women—all heavily armed—see Lilly’s light blue fleece jacket behind a deadfall log a thousand yards due north of the tent city, in the gelid darkness of the deep woods, in a small clearing under a canopy of loblolly branches. She appears to be unconscious, lying in a patch of brambles. “Careful!” Chad Bingham calls out to his second-in-command, a skinny mechanic from Augusta by the name of Dick Fenster. “If she’s still movin’, she might’ve turned already!”
Nervous breaths showing in the chill air, Fenster cautiously goes over to the clearing with his snub-nosed .38 drawn and ready, hammer back, trigger finger twitching. He kneels down by Lilly, takes a good long look, and then turns back to the group. “She’s all right! She’s alive … ain’t bit or nothing … still conscious!”
“Not for long,” Chad Bingham utters under his breath as he marches toward the clearing. “Chickenshit fucking whore gets my baby killed—”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Megan Lafferty steps between Chad and the deadfall. “Hold on a second, hold on.”
“Get outta my way, Megan.”
“You gotta take a deep breath.”
“Just gonna talk to her.”
An awkward pause seems to weigh down on everybody present. The other members of the search party stand back in the trees, looking down, their drawn, exhausted faces reflecting the day’s horrible work. Some of the men are red-eyed, stricken with loss.
Returning from their firewood-gathering expedition, the noise of their engines and axes still ringing in their ears, they were shocked to find the tent city in ghastly disarray. Both human and zombie alike littered the blood-soaked grounds, sixteen settlers slaughtered, some of them devoured—nine of them children. Josh Lee Hamilton did the dirty work of finishing off the remaining walkers and the unfortunate humans whose remains were left intact. Nobody else had the heart to shoot their friends and loved ones in the head to ensure their eternal rest. The incubation period—strangely—seems to be more and more unpredictable lately. Some victims reanimate within minutes after a bite. Others take hours—even days—to turn. At this moment, in fact, Josh is still back at camp, supervising a disposal crew, preparing the victims for mass burial. It’ll take them another twenty-four hours to get the circus tent back up.
“Dude, listen, seriously,” Megan Lafferty says to Chad, her voice lowering and becoming softly urgent. “I know you’re torn up and all but she saved three of your girls.… I told you I saw it with my own eyes. She drew the walkers away, she fucking risked her life.”
“I just—” Chad looks as though he’s either going to cry or scream. “I just … want to talk.”
“You got a wife back at camp’s gonna lose her mind with grief … she needs you.”
“I just—”
Another awkward beat of silence. One of the other fathers starts to softly weep in the shadows of the trees, his handgun falling to the ground. It’s nearly five o’clock and the cold is squeezing in, the puffs of vapor wafting in front of all of their tortured faces. Across the clearing, Lilly sits up and wipes her mouth, and tries to get her bearings. She looks like a sleepwalker. Fenster helps her to her feet.
Chad looks down. “Fuck it.” He turns and walks away, his voice trailing after him. “Fuck it.”
* * *
The next day, under a frigid overcast sky, the tent dwellers have an improvised graveside service for their fallen friends and loved ones.
Nearly seventy-five survivors gather in a large semicircle around the mass burial site on the east edge of the property. Some of the mourners hold candles flickering stubbornly against the October winds. Others clutch at each other in convulsive grief. The searing pain on some of the faces—especially those of grieving parents—reflects the agonizing randomness of this plague world. Their children were taken with the arbitrary suddenness of a lightning bolt, and now the mourners’ faces sag with desolation, their parboiled eyes shimmering in the unrelenting silver sunlight.
The cairns are set into the clay, stretching up the gentle rise of bare ground beyond the split-rail fence. Small piles of stones mark each of the sixteen graves. Some markers have hanks of wildflowers carefully wedged between the rocks. Josh Lee Hamilton made sure Sarah Bingham’s marker got adorned with a lovely bouquet of little white Cherokee roses, which grow in profusion along the edges of the orchards. The big man had grown fond of the feisty, whip-smart teenager … and her death has wrenched his heart in two.
“God, we ask that you take our lost friends and neighbors into your hands,” Josh says now from the edge of the fence, the wind buffeting his olive-drab army coat stretched across his massive shoulders. His deeply etched face glistens with tears.
Josh grew up Baptist, and although he lost most of his religion over the years, he asked his fellow survivors earlier this morning if he might say a few words. Baptists don’t put much stock in prayers for the dead. They believe the righteous instantly go to heaven at the time of death—or, if you’re a nonbeliever, you instantly go to hell—but Josh still felt obliged to say something.
He saw Lilly earlier in the day, and he held her for a moment, whispering wo
rds of comfort to her. But he could tell something was wrong. Something was going on inside her beyond mere grief. She felt limp in his enormous arms, her slender form trembling ceaselessly like a wounded bird. She said very little. Only that she needed to be alone. She didn’t show up for the burial service.
“We ask that you take them to a better place,” he goes on, his deep baritone voice cracking. The work of body disposal has taken its toll on the big man. He struggles to hold it together but his emotions are strangling his vocal chords. “We ask that you—you—”
He can’t go on. He turns away, and he bows his head and lets the silent tears come. He can’t breathe. He can’t stay here. Barely aware of what he’s doing, he finds himself moving away from the crowd, away from the soft, horrible sound of weeping and praying.
Among the many things he has missed today in his daze of sadness is the fact that Lilly Caul’s decision to avoid the burial service is not the only conspicuous absence. Chad Bingham is also missing.
* * *
“Are you okay?” Lilly keeps her distance for a moment, standing on the edge of the clearing, wringing her hands nervously, about fifteen feet away from Chad Bingham.
The wiry man in the John Deere cap says nothing for the longest time. He just stands on the edge of the tree line, his head bowed, his back to her, his shoulders slumped as though carrying a great weight.
Minutes before the burial service began, Chad Bingham surprised Lilly by showing up at her tent and asking her if they could talk privately. He said he wanted to set things right. He said he didn’t blame her for Sarah’s death, and from the heartbreaking look in his eyes, Lilly believed him.
Which is why she followed him up here to a small clearing in the dense grove of trees lining the northern edge of the property. Barely two hundred square feet of pine-needle-matted ground, bordered by mossy stones, the clearing lies under a canopy of foliage, the gray sunlight filtering down in beams of thick dust motes. The cool air smells of decay and animal droppings.
The clearing is far enough away from the tent city to provide privacy.
“Chad—” Lilly wants to say something, wants to tell him how sorry she is. For the first time since she met the man—initially appalled by his willingness to conduct a dalliance with Megan right under his wife’s nose—Lilly now sees Chad Bingham as simply human … imperfect, scared, emotional, confused, and devastated by the loss of his little girl.
In other words, he’s just some good old boy—no better or worse than any of the other survivors. And now Lilly feels a wave of sympathy washing over her. “You want to talk about it?” she asks him at last.
“Yeah, I guess … maybe not … I don’t know.” His back still turned, his voice comes out like a leaky faucet, in fits and starts, as faint as water dripping. The sorrow knots his shoulder blades, makes him tremble slightly in the shadows of the pines.
“I’m so sorry, Chad.” Lilly ventures closer to him. She has tears in her eyes. “I loved Sarah, she was such a wonderful girl.”
He says something so softly Lilly cannot hear it. She moves closer.
She puts her hand gently on the man’s shoulder. “I know there’s nothing anybody can say … a time like this.” She speaks to the back of his head. The little plastic strap on the back of his cap says SPALDING. He has a small tattoo of a snake between the cords of his neck. “I know it’s no consolation,” Lilly adds then, “but Sarah died a hero—she saved the lives of her sisters.”
“Did she?” His voice rises barely above a whisper. “She was such a good girl.”
“I know she was … she was an amazing girl.”
“You think so?” His back still turned. Head bowed. Softly shuddering shoulders.
“Yes I do, Chad, she was a hero, she was one in a million.”
“Really? You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then why didn’t you do your FUCKING JOB!” Chad turns around and strikes Lilly so hard with the back of his hand that she bites through her tongue. Her head whiplashes, and she sees stars.
Chad hits her again and she stumbles backward, tripping over an exposed root and tumbling to the ground. Chad looms over her, his fists clenching, his eyes blazing. “You stupid, worthless bitch! All you had to do is protect my girls! Fucking chimpanzee could do that!”
Lilly tries to roll away but Chad drives the steel toe of his work boot into her hip, tossing her sideways. Pain stabs her midsection. She gasps for air, her mouth filling with blood. “P-please duh—”
He reaches down and yanks her back to her feet. Holding her up by the front of her sweatshirt, he hisses at her, his sour breath hot on her face, “You and your little slutty friend think this is a party? You smoking dope last night? Huh? HUH?”
Chad smashes a right hook into Lilly’s jaw, cracking her teeth and sending her back to the ground. She lands in a heap of agony, two of her ribs cracked, the blood choking her. She can’t breathe. Icy cold spreads through her and blurs her vision.
She can barely focus on Chad Bingham’s ropy, compact form hovering over her, dropping down on her with tremendous weight, straddling her, the drool of uncontrollable rage leaking out of the corner of his mouth, his spittle flying. “Answer me! You been smoking weed when you’re with my kids?”
Lilly feels Chad’s powerful grip closing around her throat, the back of her head banging off the ground now. “ANSWER ME, YOU FFFUHHHH—”
Without warning, a third figure materializes behind Chad Bingham—pulling him off Lilly—the identity of this rescuer barely visible.
Lilly only sees a blur of a man so enormous he blots out the rays of the sun.
* * *
Josh gets two good handfuls of Chad Bingham’s denim jacket and then yanks with all his might.
Either through a sudden spike of adrenaline coursing through the big man, or simply due to Chad’s relatively scrawny girth, the resulting heave-ho makes Chad Bingham look like a human cannonball. He soars across the clearing in a high arc, one of his boots flying off, his cap spinning into the trees. He slams shoulder first into an enormous ancient tree trunk. His breath flies out of him, and he flops to the ground in front of the tree. He gasps for breath, blinking with shock.
Josh kneels by Lilly and gently raises her bloody face. She tries to speak but can’t get her bleeding lips around the words. Josh lets out a pained breath—a sort of gut-shot moan. Something about seeing that lovely face—with its sea-foam eyes and delicately freckled cheeks, now stippled with blood—sends him into a rage that draws a gauzy filter down over his eyes.
The big man rises, turns, and marches across the clearing to where Chad Bingham lies writhing in pain.
Josh can see only the milky-white blur of the man on the ground, the pale sunlight beaming down through the musty air. Chad makes a feeble attempt to crawl away but Josh easily catches the man’s retreating legs, and with a single decisive yank, Chad’s body is wrenched back in front of the tree. Josh stands the wiry man up against the trunk.
Chad stammers with blood in his mouth. “This ain’t—it ain’t none of your—pleeeease—m-my brother—you don’t have to DDUHHH—!”
Josh slams the man’s flailing body against the bark of the hundred-year-old black oak. The impact cracks the man’s skull and dislocates his shoulder blades with the violent abruptness of a battering ram.
Chad lets out a garbled, mucusy cry—more primal and involuntary than conscious—his eyes rolling back in his head. If Chad Bingham were repeatedly hit from behind by a massive battering ram, the series of impacts would not rival the force with which Josh Lee Hamilton now begins slamming the sinewy man in denim against the tree.
“I’m not your brother,” Josh says with eerie calm, a low velvety voice from some hidden, inaccessible place deep within him, as he bangs the rag doll of a man against the tree again and again.
Josh rarely loses control like this. Only a handful of times in his life has it happened: Once, on the gridiron when an opposing offensive tackle—a
good old boy from Montgomery—called him a nigger … and on another occasion when a pickpocket in Atlanta grabbed his mother’s purse. But now the quiet storm inside him rages harder than ever before—his actions unmoored and yet somehow controlled—as he repeatedly slams the back of Chad Bingham’s cranium against the tree.
Chad’s head flops with each impact, the sick thud getting more and more watery now as the back of the skull caves. Vomit roars out of Chad—again an involuntary phenomenon—the particles of cereal and yellow bile looping down, unnoticed, across Josh Lee Hamilton’s ham-hock forearms. Josh notices Chad’s left hand groping for the grip of his steel-plated Smith & Wesson tucked inside the back of his belt.
Josh easily tears the pistol out of Chad’s pants and tosses the weapon across the clearing.
With his last scintilla of strength, his brain sputtering from multiple concussions and the hemorrhage leaking out the back of his fractured skull, Chad Bingham makes a futile attempt to drive a knee up into the big man’s groin, but Josh quickly and handily blocks the knee with one forearm, and then delivers an extraordinary blow—a great winding backhand slap, a surreal echo of the slap delivered moments ago to Lilly—which sends Chad Bingham hurling sideways.
Chad sprawls to the ground fifteen feet away from the tree trunk.
Josh can’t hear Lilly stumbling across the clearing. He can’t hear her strangled voice, “Josh, NO! NO! JOSH, STOP, YOU’RE GOING TO KILL HIM!!”
All at once, Josh Lee Hamilton wakes up, and blinks as though discovering that he’s been sleepwalking and has found himself naked and wandering down Peachtree Boulevard during rush hour. He feels Lilly’s hands on his back, clawing at his coat, trying to yank him back and away from the man lying in a heap on the ground.
“You’re gonna kill him!”
Josh whirls. He sees Lilly—bruised and battered, her mouth full of blood, barely able to stand or breathe or speak—directly behind him, her watery gaze locked on to his. He pulls her into an embrace, his eyes welling with tears. “Are you okay?”
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