Lilly moves closer. She puts her hand on his shoulder. She says nothing at first. She touches his gigantic hands, which are clasped around the shotgun across his lap. He looks up at her, his expression a mask of emotional ruin. “Sorry I’m so…” he utters in barely a whisper.
“It’s okay, Josh. It’s okay. I’m here for you always. I’m with you now.”
He cocks his head, wipes his face, and manages a broken smile. “I guess you are.”
She kisses him—quickly, but on the lips—a little more than a friendly smack. The kiss lasts maybe a couple of seconds.
Josh drops the gun, puts his arms around her, and returns the gesture, and the contrary emotions flow through Lilly as the big man lets his lips linger on hers. She feels herself floating on the windswept snow. She can’t sort out the undercurrent of feelings making her dizzy. Does she pity this man? Is she manipulating him again? He tastes like coffee and smoke and Juicy Fruit gum. The cold snow touches Lilly’s eyelashes, the warmth of Josh’s lips melting the chill. He has done so much for her. She owes him her life ten times over. She opens her mouth, presses her chest against his, and then he pulls away.
“What’s wrong?” She looks up at him, searches his big sad brown eyes. Did she do something wrong? Did she step over a line?
“Nothing at all, babydoll.” He smiles and leans down and kisses her cheek. It’s a warm kiss—soft, tender, a promise of more to come. “Timing, you know,” he says then. He picks up the shotgun. “Not safe here … don’t feel right.”
For a moment, Lilly can’t figure out whether he’s referring to the woods not being right, or if he’s talking about the two of them. “I’m sorry if I—”
He gently touches her lips. “I want it to be just right … when the time comes.”
His smile is the most guileless, clean, sweet smile Lilly has ever seen. She returns his smile, her eyes misting over. Who would have thought, in the midst of all this horror—a perfect gentleman?
Lilly starts to say something else when a sharp noise grabs their attention.
* * *
Josh hears the faint drumming of hooves first, and gently shoves Lilly back behind him. He raises the squirrel gun’s rusty single barrel. The pounding noises rise. Josh thumbs the hammer back.
At first, he thinks he’s seeing things. Above them, coming down the embankment, throwing leaves and debris in their wake, a pack of animals—impossible to identify at first, just a blur of fur—charge through the foliage directly toward them. “Get down!” Josh yanks Lilly back behind a deadfall log on the edge of the creek bed.
“What is it?” Lilly crouches down behind the worm-eaten wood.
“Dinner!” Josh raises the gun’s back sight to his eyes and aims at the oncoming deer—a small cluster of does with bushy ears pinned, and eyes as wide as billiard balls—but something stops Josh from firing. His heart throbs in his chest, his skin flushing with gooseflesh—the realization exploding in his brain.
“Josh, what’s the matter?”
The deer roar past Josh, snapping twigs and throwing stones as he sidesteps the stampede.
Josh swings the gun up at the darker shadows coming behind the animals. “Run, Lilly!”
“What?—No!” She rises up behind the log, watching the deer vault across the riverbed. “I’m not leaving you!”
“Cross the creek, I’m right behind you!” Josh aims the shotgun up at the shapes coming down the hill, weaving through the undergrowth.
Lilly sees the horde of zombies lumbering toward them, at least twenty, sideswiping trees and bumping into each other. “Oh, shit.”
“GO!”
Lilly scrambles across the gravelly trough and plunges into the shadows of the adjacent forest.
Josh backs away, aiming the front sight at the leading edge of the swarm coming toward him.
All at once, in that single instant before he fires, he sees oddly shaped bodies and garb, strange burned faces and costumes mutilated practically beyond recognition, and Josh realizes what happened to the previous owners of the lost three-ring circus tent—the unfortunate members of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus.
SIX
Josh squeezes off a shot.
The blast cracks open the sky, the pigeon grain punching a divot through the forehead of the closest midget. Twenty feet away, the little rotting corpse convulses backward, banging into three other dwarfs in bloody clown face and snarling black teeth. The little zombies—as stunted and deformed as sickly gnomes—scatter sideways.
Josh takes one last glance at the surreal intruders closing in on him.
Behind the midgets, stumbling down the embankment, comes a motley assortment of dead performers. A giant strong man with a handlebar mustache and musculature torn open in bloody gouges lumbers alongside a morbidly obese female cadaver, half nude, her fat rolls dangling over her genitals, her milky eyes buried in a face as lumpy as stale dough.
Bringing up the rear, a haphazard assortment of dead carnies, freaks, and contortionists follow stupidly. Encephalitic pinheads, their tiny mouths snapping, stumble along beside ragged trapeze artists in garish sequins and gangrenous faces, followed by multiple amputees trundling along spasmodically. The pack moves in fits and starts, as feral and hungry as a school of piranhas.
Josh lurches away, vaulting across the dry creek bed in a single leap.
He scuttles up the opposite bank and plunges into the neighboring woods with the shotgun over his shoulder. There is no time to reload another shell. He can see Lilly in the distance, sprinting toward the denser trees. He catches up with her in a matter of seconds and directs her to the east.
The two of them vanish into the shadows before what remains of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus even has a chance to stagger across the creek.
* * *
On their way back to the gas station, Josh and Lilly run into a smaller herd of deer. Josh gets lucky and bags one of the juvenile does with a single blast. The booming report echoes up across the sky—far enough from Fortnoy’s to avoid drawing attention, but close enough to lug the trophy back home—and the whitetail goes down gasping and twitching.
Lilly has trouble taking her eyes off the carcass as Josh rigs his belt around its hindquarters and drags the steaming remains nearly half a mile back to Fortnoy’s. In this Plague World, death in any context—human or animal—has taken on new implications.
That night, the mood lightens among the inhabitants of the gas station.
Josh dresses the deer in the back of the service area, in the same galvanized sinks in which they’ve been bathing, and he slaughters enough of the animal to last them weeks. He keeps the excess meat outside, in the deepening cold of the back lot, and he prepares a feast of organ meat, ribs, and belly, slow cooked in the broth of some instant chicken soup that they found in the bottom drawer of Fortnoy’s office desk, along with shavings of wild meadow garlic and nettle stems. They have some canned peaches to accompany the braised deer, and they gorge themselves.
The walkers leave them alone for most of the evening—no sign of the circus dead or any other enclave. Josh notices during dinner that Bob cannot take his eyes off Megan. The older man seems taken with the girl, and for some reason this worries Josh. For days now, Bob has been very cold and brusque toward Scott (not that the kid has noticed anything in his constant state of flakiness). Nevertheless, Josh feels the volatile chemical bonds of their little tribe being tested, stressed, altered.
Later, they sit around the woodstove and smoke Josh’s homemade cigars and share a few ounces of Bob’s whiskey stash. For the first time since leaving the tent city—perhaps since the advent of the plague—they feel almost normal. They talk of escape. They speak of desert islands and antidotes and vaccines and finding happiness and stability again. They reminisce about the things they took for granted before the plague broke out: shopping in grocery stores and playing in parks and going out for dinner and watching TV shows and reading the newspaper on Sunday mornings and going to clubs to hear
live music and sitting at Starbucks and shopping at Apple stores and using Wi-Fi and getting mail through that anachronistic thing known as the postal service.
They each have their pet pleasures. Scott bemoans the extinction of good weed, and Megan longs for the days when she could hang out at her favorite bar—Nightlies in Union City—and enjoy the free cucumber shooters and shrimp skewers. Bob pines for ten-year-old bourbon the way a mother might yearn for a lost child. Lilly remembers her guilty pleasures of haunting secondhand stores and thrift shops for the perfect scarf or sweater or blouse—the days when finding cast-off clothing wasn’t a matter of survival. And Josh recalls the number of gourmet food shops he could find in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta—everything from good kimchi to rare pink truffle oil.
Either through some vagary of the wind, or perhaps the combined noise of their laughter—as well as the ticking and rattling of the woodstove—the troubling noises drifting out over the trees from the tent city go unnoticed that night for hours.
At one point—after the little dinner party breaks up and each of them finds their way back to their bedroll on the floor of the service area—Josh thinks he hears something strange echoing under the sound of the breeze tapping against the glass doors. But he simply passes it off as the wind and his imagination.
Josh offers to take the first shift, sitting watch in the front office, so he can make sure the noises are nothing. But hours go by before he hears or sees anything out of the ordinary.
The front office has a large, filthy plate-glass window across its front façade, much of the glass blocked by shelving, racks of maps and travel guides, and little pine deodorizers. The dusty merchandise blocks any sign of trouble rising up and over the distant sea of pines.
The wee hours pass, and eventually Josh dozes off in his chair.
His eyes remain shut until 4:43 A.M., at which point the first faint sound of engines coming up the hill jar him awake with a start.
* * *
Lilly stirs awake to the sound of heavy boot steps pounding through the office doorway. Sitting up against the garage wall, her ass freezing, she doesn’t notice that Bob is already awake in his tangled nest of blankets across the garage.
Sitting up and looking around the service bay, Bob Stookey apparently heard the engine noises mere seconds after they had awakened Josh out in the office. “The hell is going on?” he mumbles. “Sounds like the Indy 500 out there.”
“Everybody up,” Josh says, storming into the garage, frantically looking around the greasy floor, searching for something.
“What’s wrong?” Lilly rubs the sleep from her eyes, her heart starting to thump. “What’s going on?”
Josh comes over to her. He kneels and speaks softly yet urgently. “Something’s going down out there, vehicles moving fast, real reckless and shit—I don’t want to get caught unawares.”
She hears the roar of engines, the pinging of gravel flying. The noises are getting closer. Lilly’s mouth goes dry with panic. “Josh, what are you looking for?”
“Get dressed, babydoll, quick.” Josh glances across the room. “Bob—you see that box of .38 caliber slugs we brought back?”
Bob Stookey torques himself up to a standing position, awkwardly pulling his work trousers over his long underwear, a slice of moonlight coming through the skylight and striping his deeplylined features. “I put it over on the workbench,” he says. “What’s the deal, captain?”
Josh hurries over and grabs the box of ammo. He reaches under his lumberjack coat, pulls the .38 snubbie from his belt, flicks open the cylinder, and loads it while he talks. “Lilly, you go get the lovebirds. Bob, I’m gonna need you to get that pigeon gun of yours and meet me out front.”
“What if they’re friendly, Josh?” Lilly pulls her sweater on, steps into her muddy boots.
“Then we got nothing to worry about.” He whirls back toward the doorway. “Get moving, both of you.” He lurches out of the room.
Heart racing, flesh prickling with terror, Lilly hurries across the garage, charges through the archway, and then down the narrow aisle of the retail store. A single hanging lantern lights her way.
“You guys! Wake up!” she says after reaching the storeroom door and pounding loudly.
Shuffling noises, bare feet on cold floorboards, then the door clicks partially ajar. Megan’s drowsy, dazed face peers out on a cloud of skunk-weed smoke. “¿Qué pasa? dude—what the fuck?”
“Get up, Megan, we got trouble.”
The girl’s face goes instantly taut and alarmed. “Walkers?”
Lilly shakes her head emphatically. “I don’t think so, unless they’ve learned how to drive cars.”
* * *
Minutes later, Lilly joins Bob and Josh out in front of Fortnoy’s—in the frigid, crystalline, predawn air—while Scott and Megan huddle behind them in the office doorway with blankets wrapped around themselves. “Oh, my God,” Lilly utters, almost to herself.
A little less than a mile away, over the crest of the neighboring trees, a vast miasma of smoke rises up and blots out the stars. The horizon behind it glows a sickly pink, and it looks as though the black ocean of pines is on fire. But Lilly knows it’s not the forest that’s burning.
“What have they done?”
“This ain’t good,” Bob murmurs, the shotgun clutched in his cold hands.
“Get back,” Josh says, thumbing the hammer back on the .38 police special.
The engine noises close in, maybe a few hundred yards away now, coming up the winding farm road—the sources of the noise still obscured behind a veil of night and the trees bordering the property—their headlights creating wildly arcing beams. Tires skid and careen through gravel. Rays of light shoot up into the sky, then across the tops of trees, then back across the road.
One of the headlights flares across the Fortnoy’s sign and Josh mutters, “What the hell is wrong with them?”
Lilly stares at the first vehicle that comes into view—a late-model sedan—swerving up the snaking gravel road, then going into a skid. “What the fuck?”
“They ain’t stoppin’! THEY AIN’T STOPPIN’!!” Bob starts backing away from the twin beams of deadly halogen light.
The car skids into the lot, roaring out of control across the fifty yards of pea gravel bordering Fortnoy’s property, the rear end raising a thunderhead of dust in the indigo predawn chill.
“LOOK OUT!”
Josh springs into action, grabbing Lilly by the sleeve and pulling her out of harm’s way, while Bob spins toward the office and screams at the top of his lungs at the two lovers huddling wide-eyed in the open doorway.
“GET OUTTA THERE!!”
Megan yanks her stoner boyfriend out of the door and across the apron of cracked cement flanking the fuel islands. The sedan—revealing itself, as it looms closer and closer, to be a battered Cadillac DeVille—screeches and fishtails toward the building. Bob lunges toward Megan. Scott lets out a garbled cry.
Another vehicle—a battered SUV with a broken luggage carrier—comes squealing and careening into the lot. Bob grabs Megan and gently shoves her toward the soft weeds beyond the service doors. Scott dives for cover behind a Dumpster. Josh and Lilly duck behind a wreck near the front sign.
The sedan mows down the closest fuel pump and keeps going, its engine whining furiously. The other vehicle goes into a spin. Lilly watches in shock from about fifty feet away, behind the wreck, as the sedan crashes into the front window.
The sickening crunch of glass and metal makes Lilly jerk with a start. Debris and sparks go flying as the sedan penetrates the front of the building.
The car keeps going, rear wheels keening and spinning on the floor, destroying half the building with the force of a giant wrecking ball. Lilly puts her hand to her mouth. The front half of Fortnoy’s roof collapses on the sedan as it comes to rest in the retail store.
The SUV slams sideways into the diesel pump, setting the fumes alight. Fire booms upward in a sheath and licks at t
he rising vapors. The windows of the SUV flicker a dull yellow from something burning inside it. Lilly silently thanks God that the fuel reserves are empty, or she and her friends would be vaporized by now.
The SUV comes to rest at an angle under the awning, its high beams still shining brightly, illuminating the building like stage lights in a hallucinatory play.
For a moment, the silence crashes down on the property until the crackle of flames and the sizzle of fluids are all that can be heard.
Josh cautiously moves out from behind the wreck, still clutching his .38 revolver. Lilly joins him and is about to say something like, What the hell just happened, when she notices the headlights of the SUV are shining directly into the building, a wide pool of light falling directly on the rear of the sedan.
Inside the car’s rear window—fractured by huge starbursts of broken glass—something moves. Lilly sees the back of someone’s shoulders, slowly turning, pivoting awkwardly, revealing a pale, discolored face.
All at once, Lilly knows exactly what happened.
* * *
Moments later, things at Fortnoy’s start unraveling at a rapid rate as Josh calls out to the others in a frantic whisper. “Get away from the building!”
Across the lot, Bob, Megan, and Scott still crouch in the weeds behind the Dumpster. They slowly rise and start to answer.
“SSSSSHHHHHHHHH!!” Josh points at the building, indicating the dangers inside, and whispers loud enough to get them moving. “Hurry up! Get over here!!”
Bob understands instantly, and he takes Megan’s hand and creeps around the flickering flames of the diesel pump. Scott follows.
Lilly stands next to Josh. “What are we gonna do? All our stuff’s in there.”
The front of the station and half its interior are totaled, the sparks still sputtering, the water mains still flooding the cold floors.
In the glare of the SUV’s headlight beams, one of the sedan’s flapping rear doors suddenly creaks open wider, a decomposed leg clad in rags stepping out in fitful, spastic movements.
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