By the time he arrives at the south entrance, the crowd noises are swelling and ringing inside the structure like waves crashing against a shore, magnified by the metallic baffles of the arena. Bob creeps through the dark, fetid tunnel toward the light. He pauses just inside the south gate and takes a healthy pull off the bottle of hooch, girding himself, buffering his nerves. The whiskey burns and makes his eyes water.
He steps into the light.
At first all he sees are blurry, indistinct shapes down on the infield, obscured behind massive cyclone fences rising up in front of the spectators. The bleachers on either side of him are mostly empty. The citizens sit above him, scattered across the upper decks, clapping and whooping and craning their necks to see the action. The harsh brilliance of the arc light shining down makes Bob blink. The air smells of old burned rubber and gasoline, and Bob has to squint to identify what’s going on down on the track.
He takes a step closer, leans toward the fence, and peers through the chain link.
Two large men grapple with each other in the center of the muddy infield. Sam the Butcher, seminude in his blood-spattered athletic trunks, his bare chest sagging, and his belly hanging over his belt, swings a jury-rigged wooden club at Stinson, the big, lumpy middle-aged guardsman. Stinson, his camo pants dark with bodily fluids, staggers and jerks back, trying to dodge the onslaught, an eighteen-inch machete in his greasy hand. The end of the butcher’s club—sprouting rusty nails on one side—catches the side of Stinson’s doughy face, gouging flesh.
Stinson rears backward, throwing spittle and strands of thick blood.
The crowd issues a salvo of yelps and angry cheers as Stinson topples over his own feet. Dust rises up into the sodium light as the portly guardsman hits the ground, the machete flying out of his grip and landing in the dirt. The butcher pounces with the club. Nails puncture Stinson’s jugular and left pectoral before the man has a chance to roll away. The audience yowls.
Bob turns away for a moment, feeling nauseous and dizzy. He takes another huge gulp of whiskey and lets the burn soothe his terror. He takes another, and another, and finally works up enough nerve to gaze back at the action. The butcher is pummeling Stinson, sending gouts of blood—as black as tar in the sodium lights—spraying across the matted brown turf of the infield.
The wide dirt track circling the infield has armed guards at each gate, intently watching the fracas, their assault rifles cradled at the ready. Bob swallows more whiskey and averts his gaze from the grisly slaughter, focusing on the upper regions of the racetrack. The diamond-vision screen is blank, powerless, probably inoperable. The glass enclosures of VIP boxes lining one side of the arena are mostly deserted and dark … all except for one.
The Governor and Martinez stand behind the window of the center box, looking down on the spectacle with unreadable expressions on their faces.
Bob chugs another few fingers of whiskey—he’s already halfway through the bottle—and finds himself avoiding eye contact with the crowd. In his peripheral vision he can see the faces of young and old, male and female, all riveted to the bloody skirmish. Many faces contort with a kind of manic delight. Some of the onlookers rise to their feet, hands waving as though they are finding Jesus.
Down on the field the butcher delivers one last savage blow to Stinson’s kidney, the nails sinking into the guardsman’s fleshy lower back. Blood bubbles and gushes, and then Stinson sags in the dirt, convulsing, twitching in his death throes. Breathing hard, drooling with psychotic glee, the butcher raises the club and faces the crowd. The spectators respond with a surge of howls.
Repulsed, woozy, going numb with horror, Bob Stookey chugs more whiskey and looks down.
“I THINK WE HAVE A WINNER!”
The amplified voice coming through the public address system echoes and feeds back with harsh, electronic squealing noises. Bob gazes up and sees the Governor behind the center box window casually speaking into a microphone. Even from this great distance, Bob can see the weird pleasure glimmering behind the Governor’s eyes like two pinpoints of starlight. Bob looks back down.
“HOLD ON! HOLD ON!! LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I THINK WE HAVE A COMEBACK!!”
Bob looks up.
On the infield, the big lump on the ground has come back to life. Lurching toward the machete, Stinson gets his blood-slick hand around the hilt and twists back toward the butcher, who has his back turned. Stinson pounces with every last ounce of strength. The butcher turns and tries to shield his face as the machete slashes.
The blade sinks into the butcher’s neck deep enough to get stuck.
The butcher staggers and falls backward with the machete still planted in his jugular. Stinson moves in with drunken rage, the blood loss making him lumber and weave with eerie resemblance to a zombie. The crowd jeers and roars. Stinson pulls the machete loose and delivers another devastating blow to the butcher’s neck, severing the gaunt man’s head between the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae.
The spectators cheer as the butcher’s neck floods the ground with its lifeblood.
Bob looks away. He falls to his knees, one hand still clutching the chain link. His stomach lurches and he vomits on the cement floor of the mezzanine. The bottle falls but does not break. Bob pukes out the entire contents of his stomach in heaving gasps—the noise of the crowd going all watery, everything getting blurry and indistinct in his watery vision. He vomits and vomits until there is nothing left but thin strands of bile hanging off his lips. He falls back against the first row of empty bleachers. He retrieves the bottle and sucks down the rest of its contents.
The amplified voice echoes: “AND THAT, FOLKS, IS WHAT WE CALL JUSTICE!”
* * *
Outside the arena, at that moment, the streets of Woodbury could be confused with any other deserted ghost ship of a village in the Georgia countryside—abandoned and scoured clean in the advent of the plague.
At first glance, every last inhabitant appears to be missing in action—the entire population still gathered in the stadium, riveted to the final moments of the battle royale. Even the sidewalk in front of the food center has been cleared, any lingering evidence of murder mopped away by Stevens and his men, Josh’s body carted off to the morgue.
Now, in the darkness, as the muffled echoes of the crowd swirl on the wind, Lilly Caul wanders the sidewalk in her fleece, torn jeans, and tattered high-tops. She cannot sleep, cannot think, cannot stop crying. The noise from the arena feels like insects crawling on her. The Xanax Bob gave her has done nothing but dull the pain, like a layer of gauze over her racing thoughts. She shivers in the cold and pauses in a dark vestibule in front of a boarded drugstore.
“It’s none of my business,” a voice says from the shadows. “But a young lady like yourself shouldn’t be out alone on these streets.”
Lilly turns and sees the glint of metal-rimmed glasses on a dark face. She sighs, wipes her eyes, and looks down. “What difference does it make?”
Dr. Stevens steps into the flickering light of torches. He stands with his hands in his pockets, his lab coat buttoned to the collar, a scarf around his neck. “How are you holding up, Lilly?”
She looks at him through her tears. “Holding up? I’m just grand.” She tries to breathe but her lungs feel as though they’re full of sand. “Next stupid question.”
“You might think about resting.” He comes over to her and inspects her bruises. “You’re still in shock, Lilly. You need sleep.”
She manages a pallid smile. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” She cringes and looks down, the tears burning her eyes. “Funny thing is, I hardly knew him.”
“He seemed like a good man.”
She looks up, focusing on the doctor. “Is that even possible anymore?”
“Is what possible?”
“Being a good person.”
The doctor lets out a sigh. “Probably not.”
Lilly swallows and looks down. “I have to get out of this place.” She winces at another sob building in her
. “I can’t deal with it anymore.”
Stevens looks at her. “Join the club.”
A moment of awkward silence passes.
Lilly rubs her eyes. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Stay here … put up with this shit. You seem like a semisane person to me.”
The doctor shrugs. “Looks can be deceiving. Anyway … I stay for the same reason they all stay.”
“And that is…?”
“Fear.”
Lilly looks at the paving stones. She doesn’t say anything. What is there to say? The torchlight across the street dwindles, the wicks burning down, the shadows deepening in the nooks and crannies between the buildings. Lilly fights the dizziness washing over her. She doesn’t want to sleep ever again.
“They’re going to be coming out of there pretty soon,” the doctor says with a nod toward the racetrack in the distance. “Once they’ve had their fill of the little horror show Blake has concocted for them.”
Lilly shakes her head. “Place is a fucking madhouse, and that dude is the craziest one of all.”
“Tell you what.” The doctor gestures toward the opposite end of town. “Why don’t we take a little walk, Lilly … avoid the crowds.”
She exhales a pained breath, then shrugs and mutters, “Whatever…”
* * *
That night, Dr. Stevens and Lilly walk for over an hour in the cold, bracing air, meandering back and forth along the far fence on the east side of town, and then down along the abandoned railroad tracks inside the security fence. While they walk and talk, the crowd slowly files out of the arena, wandering back to their dwellings, bloodlust satiated. The doctor does most of the talking that night, speaking softly, ever mindful of the listening ears of guards, who are positioned at strategic corners along the barricade, equipped with guns, binoculars, and walkie-talkies.
The guards are in constant contact with Martinez, who has cautioned his men to pay close attention to the weak areas along the ramparts, and especially the wooded hills to the south and west. Martinez worries that the noise of the gladiatorial matches will very likely draw walkers.
Strolling along the outskirts, Stevens gives Lilly a lecture about the perils of conspiring against the Governor. Stevens warns her to watch her tongue, and he speaks in analogies that make Lilly’s head spin. He talks of Caesar Augustus and he speaks of Bedouin dictators through history and how the hardships of desert communities spurred brutal regimes and coups and violent insurrection.
Eventually Stevens brings the conversation full circle to the unfortunate realities of the zombie plague, and suggests that bloodthirsty leaders are very likely a necessary evil now, a side effect of survival.
“I don’t want to live like that,” Lilly says at last, walking slowly alongside the doctor through a palisade of bare trees. The wind spits a light sleet in their faces, which stings their flesh and coats the forest with a delicate rime of ice. Christmas is only twelve days off, not that anybody would notice.
“No choice in the matter, Lilly,” the doctor mutters, head down, scarf across his chin. He stares at the ground as he walks.
“You always have a choice.”
“You think? I don’t know, Lilly.” They walk in silence for a moment. The doctor slowly shakes his head as he walks. “I don’t know.”
She looks at him. “Josh Hamilton never went bad. My dad sacrificed his life for me.” Lilly takes a breath and struggles with her tears. “It’s just an excuse. A person is born bad. The shit we’re dealing with now … it’s just a fucking trigger. Brings out the real person.”
“Then God help us,” the doctor murmurs, almost more to himself than to Lilly.
* * *
The next day, under a low, steel-gray sky, a small contingent buries Josh Lee Hamilton in a makeshift casket. Lilly, Bob, Stevens, Alice, and Megan are joined by Calvin Deets, one of the workmen, who had grown fond of Josh over the last couple of weeks.
Deets is an older man, an emaciated chain-smoker—probably in the late stages of emphysema—who has a face like an old saddlebag left out in the sun. He stands respectfully back behind the front row of friends, his Caterpillar cap in his gnarled hands, as Lilly says a few words.
“Josh grew up in a religious family,” Lilly says in a choked voice, her face turned down as though addressing the frozen ground on the edge of a playground. “He believed we all go to a better place.”
Other recent graves spread across the small park, some with homemade crosses or carefully stacked cairns of polished stones. The mound of dirt over Josh’s grave rises up at least four feet above ground level. They had to enclose his remains in a piano case that Deets found in a warehouse—the only container big enough to accommodate the fallen giant—and it took Bob and Deets several hours to carve out a suitable hole in the icebound earth.
“Here’s hoping Josh is right, because we all…” Lilly’s voice falters, crumbles. She closes her eyes and the tears seep through her eyelids. Bob takes a step closer, puts an arm around her. Lilly lets out a sob that shudders through her. She cannot continue.
Bob says softly, “Father … Son and … Holy Spirit. Amen.” The others murmur likewise. Nobody moves. The wind kicks up and blows a sheet of powdery-dry snow across the playground, nipping their faces.
Bob gently urges Lilly away from the grave. “C’mon, darlin’ … let’s get you inside.”
Lilly puts up little resistance, shuffling alongside Bob as the others turn away silently, heads down, faces crestfallen. For a moment, it looks as though Megan—dressed in a worn leather jacket, which some anonymous benefactor gave her in a druggy post-coitus afterglow—is about to hurry after Lilly, maybe say something to her. But the corkscrew-haired woman with the dishwater-green eyes just lets out an anguished sigh and keeps her distance.
Stevens gives Alice a nod, and the two of them turn and head back down the side road toward the racetrack complex, turning up the collars of their lab coats against the wind. They get halfway to the main drag—safely out of earshot of the others—when Alice says to the doctor, “Did you smell it?”
He nods. “Yep … it’s on the wind … it’s coming from the north.”
Alice sighs, shaking her head. “I knew these idiots would draw a crowd with all that noise. Should we tell somebody?”
“Martinez already knows.” The doctor indicates the guard tower behind them. “Lots of saber rattling going on, God help us.”
Alice lets out another sigh. “Gonna be busy next few days, aren’t we?”
“That guardsman used up half our whole blood supply, gonna need some more donors.”
“I’ll do it,” Alice says.
“Appreciate the thought, sweetheart, but we got enough A positive to last us until Easter. Besides, I take any more out of you I’ll have to plant you next to the big guy.”
“Should we keep searching for an O positive?”
The doctor shrugs. “Like looking for a very small needle in a very small haystack.”
“I haven’t checked Lilly or that other new kid, what’s his name.”
“Scott? The stoner?”
“Yeah.”
The doctor shakes his head. “Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of him in days.”
“You never know.”
The doctor keeps shaking his head, hands deep in his pockets, as he hastens toward the shadows of concrete archways in the distance. “Yeah … you never know.”
* * *
That night, back in her squatter’s flat above the boarded-up dry cleaner, Lilly feels numb. She’s thankful that Bob has chosen to stay with her for a while. He makes her dinner—his special beef jerky Stroganoff courtesy of Hamburger Helper—and they share enough of Bob’s single-malt Scotch and generic Ambien to ease Lilly’s racing thoughts.
The noises outside the second-story window grow fainter and farther away—although they seem to be making Bob nervous as he tucks Lilly in. Something is going on down on the streets. Maybe trouble. But Lilly ca
nnot focus on the distant commotion of voices and running footsteps.
She feels as though she’s floating, and the moment she lays her head on the pillow she sinks into semiconsciousness. The bare floors and sheet-covered windows of the apartment blur away into a white oblivion. But right before she sinks into the void of dreamless sleep, she sees Bob’s weathered face looming over her.
“Why won’t you leave with me, Bob?”
The question hangs there for a moment. Bob shrugs. “Haven’t really thought about it.”
“There’s nothing for us here anymore.”
He looks away. “Governor says things are gonna get better soon.”
“What’s the deal with you and him?”
“Whattya talkin’ about?”
“He’s got a hold on you, Bob.”
“That ain’t true.”
“I just don’t get it.” Lilly fades. She can barely see the weathered man sitting on the side of her bed. “He’s trouble, Bob.”
“He’s just trying to—”
Lilly barely hears the knock on the door. She tries to keep her eyes open. Bob goes to the door, and Lilly tries to stay awake long enough to identify the visitor. “Bob…? Who is it…?
Footsteps. Two figures come into view over her bed like ghosts. Lilly struggles to see through the shade descending over her eyes.
Bob stands next to a gaunt, lean, dark-eyed man with a carefully trimmed Fu Manchu mustache and coal-black hair. The man smiles as Lilly sinks into unconsciousness.
“Sleep tight, girlfriend,” the Governor says. “You’ve had a long day.”
* * *
The behavior patterns of the walkers continue to baffle and enthrall the deeper thinkers among Woodbury’s inhabitants. Some believe the undead move as bees in a hive, driven by something far more complex than mere hunger. Some theories involve invisible pheromonelike signals passing among zombies, producing behaviors that depend upon the chemical makeup of their prey. Others believe in dog-whistle sensory responses above and beyond mere attraction to sound or smell or movement. No single hypothesis has stuck, but most of Woodbury’s residents feel certain about one aspect of zombie behavior: The advent of a herd of any size is to be dreaded and feared and treated with respect. Herds tend to grow spontaneously and take on troubling ramifications. A herd—even a small one, like the cluster of dead forming at this very moment north of town, drawn by the noise of the gladiatorial match the previous night—can overturn a truck, snap fence posts like kindling, or topple even the highest wall.
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