“It’s a Movado, worth five hundred easy.”
“Not around here it ain’t.”
“Give us a break, will ya? Been eating outta cans for weeks.”
The man picks up the watch and inspects it with a sour expression as though it’s covered in feces. “I’ll give ya fifty dollars’ worth of rice and beans, slab bacon, and them Egg Beaters.”
“C’mon, man. Fifty dollars?”
“Got some white peaches in back, too, just came in from the road, I’ll throw those in. That’s all I can do.”
“I don’t know.” Josh looks at Lilly, who stares back at him with a shrug. Josh looks at Wheelchair Man. “I don’t know, man.”
“That’ll keep the two of you going for a week.”
Josh sighs. “That’s a Movado, man. That’s a fine piece of craftsmanship.”
“Lookit, I ain’t gonna argue with—”
A baritone voice from behind the guards rings out, interrupting the man in the wheelchair. “What the fuck’s the problem?”
All heads turn toward a figure coming around the corner of the stockroom, wiping his bloody hands in a towel. The tall, gaunt, weathered man wears a horribly stained butcher’s apron, the fabric mottled with blood and marrow. His chiseled, sunburned face, set off by ice-chip blue eyes, glowers at Josh. “There a problem here, Davy?”
“Everything’s hunky-dory, Sam,” the man in the wheelchair says, not taking his eyes off Lilly. “These folks were somewhat dissatisfied with my offer, and they were just leaving.”
“Hold on a second.” Josh raises his hands in a contrite gesture. “I’m sorry if I offended you but I didn’t say I was—”
“All offers are final,” Sam the Butcher announces, throwing his grisly-looking towel on the counter and glaring at Josh. “Unless…” He seems to change his mind. “Forget it, never mind.”
Josh looks at the man. “Unless what?”
The man in the apron looks at the others, then purses his lips thoughtfully. “See … what most folks do around here is work off their debts, pitching in on the wall, patching fences, stacking sandbags and such. You’ll definitely get more bang for your buck offering up them big muscles of yours in trade.” He gives Lilly a look. “’Course there’s all kinds of services a person could provide, all kinds of ways to get more bang.” He grins. “Especially a person of the female persuasion.”
Lilly realizes the men behind the counter are all looking at her now, each of them grinning lasciviously. At first she’s taken by surprise, and she just stands there blinking. Then she feels all the blood rushing out of her face. She gets dizzy. She wants to kick over the table, or storm out of that musty-smelling chamber, knocking over the shelves and suggesting that they all fuck themselves. But the fear, the throat-closing fear—her old nemesis—holds her paralyzed, her feet nailed to the floor. She wonders what the hell is wrong with her. How did she survive this long without getting devoured? All she’s been through and she can’t even deal with a few sexist pigs?
Josh speaks up. “Okay, you know what … this is not necessary.”
Lilly looks at the big black man and sees his huge, square jaw tensing. She wonders whether Josh is talking about the concept of Lilly trading sexual services not being necessary or these thugs making crude, chauvinist comments not being necessary. The store gets very quiet. Sam the Butcher levels his gaze at Josh.
“Don’t be so quick to judge, Big Hoss.” An ember of contempt smolders in the butcher’s humorless blue eyes. He wipes his slimy hands on the apron. “Little lady with a body like that on her, you could be swimming in steak and eggs for a month.”
The smirks on the other men turn to laughter. But the butcher barely smiles. His impassive stare seems to be locked on to Josh with the intensity of an arc welder. Lilly feels her heart racing.
She puts a hand on Josh’s arm, which is pulsing under his lumberjack coat, tendons as coiled as telephone cable. “C’mon, Josh,” she says, almost under her breath. “It’s okay. Get your watch and let’s go.”
Josh smiles respectfully at the laughing men. “Steak and eggs. That’s a good one. Listen. Keep the watch. We’ll take you up on them beans and Egg Beaters and the rest.”
“Go get ’em their food,” the butcher says, still with those pale blue eyes fixed on Josh.
The two guards disappear in the back for a moment, gathering up the items. They return with a crate filled with oil-spotted brown paper sacks. “Appreciate it,” Josh says softly, taking the food. “We’ll let you fellas get back to your business. Have a good day.”
Josh ushers Lilly toward the door, Lilly hyperaware now of the gazes of the men on her backside the whole way out.
* * *
That afternoon, a commotion in one of the vacant lots on the northern edge of the village draws the attention of the townspeople.
Outside one of the cyclone fences, behind a wooded grove, a series of nauseating shrieks echoes on the wind. Josh and Lilly hear the screaming, and they race along the edge of the construction zone to see what’s going on.
By the time they reach a high mound of gravel and climb to the top to see into the distance, three gunshots have rung out over the treetops a hundred and fifty yards away.
Josh and Lilly crouch down in the dying sun, the wind in their faces, as they peer around a pile of debris and notice five men in the distance, near a hole in the fence. One of the men—Blake, the self-proclaimed Governor—wears a long coat and holds what appears to be an automatic pistol in his hand. The scene crackles with tension.
On the ground in front of Blake, tangled in the jagged, torn chain-link fence, a teenage boy, bleeding from bite wounds, claws at the dirt, trying frantically to extricate himself from the fence and return home.
In the shadows of the forest, directly behind the boy, three dead walkers lie in heaps, their skulls breached by gunfire, and the narrative of what has just happened coalesces in Lilly’s mind.
The boy apparently lit out by himself to explore the woods, and he was attacked. Now, badly wounded and infected, the boy, trying to return to safety, writhes in pain and terror on the ground, as Blake stands emotionlessly over him, gazing down with the impassive stare of an undertaker.
Lilly jumps when the boom of the 9-millimeter in Philip Blake’s hand echoes. The boy’s head erupts, and the body sags immediately.
* * *
“I don’t like this place, Josh, not even a little.” Lilly sits on the Ram’s rear bumper, sipping tepid coffee from a paper cup.
Darkness has fallen on their second evening in Woodbury and already the town has absorbed Megan, Scott, and Bob into its folds like a multicelled organism living off fear and suspicion, acquiring new life-forms on a daily basis. The town leaders have offered the newcomers a place to live—a studio apartment above a boarded-up drugstore at the end of Main Street—well outside the walled-in area but high enough above street level to be safe. Megan and Scott have already moved much of their stuff up there and have even bartered their sleeping bags for a nickel’s worth of locally grown weed.
Bob has stumbled upon a working tavern inside the safe zone, and already has traded half his rations of Walmart products for a few drink tickets and a little drunken camaraderie.
“I’m not crazy about this place myself, babydoll,” Josh concurs as he paces behind Bob’s camper, his breath showing in the cold. His huge hands are oily with bacon grease from the dinner he just prepared on the camper’s Coleman stove, and he wipes them on his lumberjack coat. He and Lilly have been sticking close to the Ram all day, trying to decide what to do. “But we ain’t looking at a lot of options right now. This place is better than the open road.”
“Really?” Lilly shivers in the cold and clutches at the collar of her down coat. “You sure about that?”
“At least it’s safe.”
“Safe from what? It’s not the walls and the fences keeping things out I’m worried about…”
“I know, I know.” Josh lights a stogie and puffs a fe
w swirls of smoke. “It’s wound pretty tight around here. But it’s pretty much like this everywhere you go nowadays.”
“Jesus.” Lilly shivers some more and sips her coffee. “Where’s Bob, anyway?”
“Hanging out with them geezers at the taproom.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Josh goes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Lil. We’ll rest up, we’ll stockpile some stuff … I’ll do some work in trade … and we’ll get outta here by the end of the week.” He tosses his stogie and sits next to her. “I won’t let anything happen.”
She looks at him. “Promise?”
“Promise.” He kisses her cheek. “I’ll protect you, girlie-girl. Always. Always…”
She kisses him back.
He puts his arms around her and kisses her on the lips. She wraps her arms around his thick neck and things begin to happen. His enormous tender hands find the small of her back, and their kiss turns to something hotter, more desperate. They intertwine, and he urges her back inside the camper, into the private darkness.
They leave the rear hatch open, oblivious to everything but each other, as they begin to make love.
It’s better than either one of them dreamed it would be. Lilly loses herself in the murky dark, the light of an icy harvest moon shining in through the gap, as Josh lets all his lonely desire pour out in a series of heaving gasps. He sheds his coat, gets his undershirt off—his skin looks almost indigo in the moonlight. Lilly peels her bra up and over herself, the soft weight of her breasts splaying across her rib cage. Gooseflesh spreads down her tummy as Josh gently enters her and builds steam.
They make feverish love. Lilly forgets everything, even the savage environment outside the camper.
A minute, an hour—time is meaningless now—all of it passes in a blur.
* * *
Later, they lie among the detritus of Bob’s camper, legs intertwined, Lilly’s head against the massive curve of Josh’s bicep, a blanket covering them, staving off the chill. Josh presses his lips against the soft convolutions of Lilly’s ear and whispers, “Gonna be okay.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs.
“We’re gonna make it.”
“Absolutely.”
“Together.”
“You got that right.” She lays her right arm across Josh’s massive chest, and she looks into his sad eyes. She feels strange. Buoyant, woozy. “Been thinking about this moment for a long time.”
“Me, too.”
They let the silence engulf them, carrying them away, and they lie there like that for some time, unaware of the dangers lying in wait … unaware of the brutal outside world tightening its grasp.
Most important, they are unaware of the fact that they are being watched.
NINE
On their third day in town, the winter rains roll in, drawing a dark gray pall of misery down over Woodbury. It’s already early December and Thanksgiving has come and gone without so much as a wishbone being snapped, and now the dampness as well as the cold starts getting into people’s joints. The sandy lots along Main Street turn to wet plaster and the sewers swell and overflow with tainted runoff. A human hand bubbles out of one of the gratings.
That day Josh decides to trade his best chef’s knife—a Japanese Shun—for bed linens and towels and soap, and he convinces Lilly to move her things into the apartment over the dry cleaner, where they can take sponge baths and find temporary refuge from the cramped quarters of the camper. Lilly stays indoors most of the day, fervently writing diary entries on a roll of wrapping paper and planning her escape. Josh keeps a close eye on her. Something feels wrong—more wrong than he can articulate.
Scott and Megan are nowhere to be found. Lilly suspects that Megan, already growing bored with Scott, is prostituting herself for dope.
That afternoon Bob Stookey finds a couple of kindred spirits in the bowels of the racetrack, where a labyrinth of cinder-block storage facilities and service areas has been turned into a makeshift infirmary. While the cold-steel rain pummels the metal beams and stanchions of the arena above them—sending a dull, hissing, incessant drone down through the bones of the building—a middle-aged man and a young woman give Bob the grand tour.
“Alice here has been a quick study as a neophyte nurse, I have to say,” the man in the wire-frame reading glasses and stained lab coat comments, as he leads Bob and the young lady through an open doorway and into a cluttered examination room. The man’s name is Stevens, and he’s a trim, intelligent, wry sort who seems out of place to Bob in this feral town. The ersatz nurse, also in a hand-me-down lab coat, looks younger than her years. Her dishwater-blond hair is braided and pulled back from her girlish face.
“I’m still working at it,” the girl says, following the men into the dimly lit room, the floor humming with the vibrations of a central generator. “I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of second-year nursing school.”
“Both y’all know a lot more than I do,” Bob admits. “I’m just an old battle tech.”
“She had her baptism of fire last month, God knows,” the doctor says, pausing next to a battered X-ray machine. “Business was brisk down here for a while.”
Bob looks around the room, sees the bloodstains and the signs of chaotic triage, and he asks what happened.
The doctor and the nurse share an uneasy glance. “Changeover in power.”
“Excuse me?”
The doctor sighs. “Place like this, you see a kind of natural selection going on. Only the pure sociopaths survive. It’s not pretty.” He takes a breath, and then smiles at Bob. “Still, it’s good to have a medic around.”
Bob wipes his mouth. “Not sure how much help I’d be, but I gotta admit, it sure would be nice to lean on the skills of a real doctor for once.” Bob motions at one of the old, battered machines. “I see y’all got an old Siemens machine there, used to truck one of those around Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not exactly Bellevue but we’ve got the basics, scavenged them from area clinics … got infusion pumps, IV drips, a couple monitors, ECG, EEG … we’re light on the pharmacy, though.”
Bob tells them about the medicine he scavenged from Walmart. “You’re welcome to any or all of it,” he says. “I got a couple of spare doctor’s bags full of the usual. Got extra dressings, you name it. It’s yours, you need it.”
“That’s great, Bob. Where you from?”
“Vicksburg originally, was living in Smyrna when the Turn came. How about you folks?”
“Atlanta,” Stevens replies. “Had a small practice in Brookhaven before everything went to hell.”
“Also from Atlanta,” the girl chimes in. “Was going to school at Georgia State.”
Stevens has a pleasant look on his face. “You been drinking, Bob?”
“Huh?”
Stevens gestures toward the silver flask partially visible in Bob’s hip pocket. “You been drinking today?”
Bob lowers his head, crestfallen, ashamed. “Yessir, I have.”
“You drink every day, Bob?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hard liquor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bob, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.” The doctor pats Bob’s shoulder. “It’s none of my business. I’m not judging you. But can I ask how much you’re putting away every day?”
Bob’s chest tightens with humiliation. Alice gazes elsewhere for a moment, out of respect. Bob swallows his shame. “I have no earthly idea. Sometimes a couple of pints, sometimes a whole fifth when I can get it.” Bob looks up at the slender, bespectacled doctor. “I’ll understand if you don’t want me getting near your—”
“Bob, relax. You don’t understand. I think it’s fantastic.”
“Huh?”
“Keep drinking. Drink as much as possible.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You mind sharing a sip?”
Bob slowly pulls the flask, not taking his eyes off the doctor.
&nb
sp; “Appreciate it.” Stevens takes the flask, nods a thank-you, and takes a pull. He wipes his mouth and offers it to Alice.
The girl waves it off. “No, thanks, it’s a little early in the day for me.”
Stevens takes another sip and hands the flask back. “You stay here for any length of time you’re gonna need to drink heavily.”
Bob puts the flask back in his pocket. He doesn’t say anything.
Stevens smiles again, and there’s something heartbreaking behind the smile. “That’s my prescription, Bob. Stay as drunk as possible.”
* * *
On the other side of the racetrack complex, beneath the north end of the arena, a wiry, tightly coiled individual emerges from an unmarked metal door and gazes up at the sky. The rain has ceased for the moment, leaving behind a low ceiling of sooty clouds. The wiry gentleman carries a small bundle wrapped in a threadbare woolen blanket the color of dead grass, gathered at the top with rawhide.
The wiry man crosses the street and starts down the sidewalk, his raven-black hair slick with moisture and pulled back in a ponytail today.
As he walks, his preternaturally alert gaze is everywhere, practically all at once, taking in everything that goes on around him. In recent weeks the emotions that have plagued him have subsided, the voice in his head silent now. He feels strong. This town is his raison d’être, the fuel that keeps him keen and sharp.
He is about to turn the corner at the intersection of Canyon and Main when he notices a figure in his peripheral vision. The older guy—the drunk who came in a few days ago with the nigger and the girls—is emerging from the warehouse at the south end of the racetrack. The weathered old dude pauses for a moment to take a gulp from his flask, and the look on his face after swallowing and cringing at the burn is apparent to the wiry man even a block away.
In the distance, the older dude grimaces as the alcohol streams down his gullet, and the grimace is weirdly familiar to the wiry man. The grimace—full of shame and desolation—makes the wiry man feel strange and sentimental, almost tender. The older man puts the flask away and starts trundling toward Main Street with that trademark gait—half limp, half drunken amble—which many homeless people get after years of struggling on the street. The wiry man follows.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 46