She tilts her head toward the side door leading into the cellblock corridor. “Exactly.” She stands and brushes herself off, then checks her pistols. “Sounds like the stragglers have drifted away, gotten bored with the empty hallways.” She flicks the safety on her Ruger. “I’m gonna check out the cellblock, see if we can’t find anything useful.”
Austin stands up and nearly falls over from the rush of dizziness. He swallows the nausea rising inside him. “I’ll go with you.”
“No, no way.” She shoves the gun in her belt, checks the second pistol, shoves it down the back of her jeans. “You’re in no shape to go. I’ll take the others with me. You stay here and hold down the fort.”
He looks at her. “I’m going with you, girlfriend.”
She sighs. “Okay … whatever. I don’t have the energy to argue with you.” She goes over to the glass door, pushes it open, and gazes out at the dreary light of the foyer. “Ben? Matthew?”
Out in the reception area, the others are huddled together on the floor. They sit on a blanket after a sleepless night, their eyes red and drawn with fatigue. At first, they appear to be playing some kind of game, the contents of their pockets in a pile on the blanket in front of them as though wagers are being made. But very quickly Lilly realizes that they’re pooling the meager resources from their pockets: candy bars, keys, cigarettes, a flashlight, chewing gum, a couple of hunting knives, a scope, a walkie-talkie, handkerchiefs, a canteen, and a roll of electrical tape.
“What’s going on?” Matthew springs to his feet, reaching for his ammo belts. “What’s happening with junior?”
“I’m right as rain,” Austin replies sternly from behind Lilly, his voice sounding as though he’s about as right as a whipped dog. “Thank you for asking.”
“I need some of you to give me a hand with a quick search of the corridor,” Lilly tells them. “Matthew, you come along with the AK … just in case … and Ben, you too … bring those knives.” She looks at Gloria. “The rest of you hold down the fort. Something goes awry, fire off a single warning shot. You understand?”
They all nod.
“C’mon,” she says to the others, “let’s do this quickly and quietly.”
The three men follow Lilly over to the side door. Lilly draws her .22, takes a breath, and yanks the iron stand off its temporary mooring. She carefully turns the knob, the door squeaking softly as she cracks it open a few inches. Through the gap she peers out, craning her neck to see down the hundred-foot length of main corridor.
The hallway sits in silent darkness, a few cells along the walls sitting open.
At the far end of the corridor, so far away that they look like indistinct jumbles of clothing strewn across the floor, Lilly sees the remains of the three men sent into the prison by the Governor the previous afternoon. They now lie torn to shreds on the tiles, their torsos and extremities so mutilated that they’re unrecognizable as men. Their drying blood coats the floor and walls.
Fortunately, as far as Lilly can tell, the walkers have moved on, despite the fact that their putrid odors still cling to the air.
Lilly gives everybody a nod, and one by one they slip into the corridor.
* * *
They get halfway down the hallway, passing empty cell after empty cell, finding nothing but litter and discarded clothing on the floors—people obviously left in a hurry—when Austin suddenly hears a noise behind him. He wheels around and comes face-to-face with a figure bursting out of one of the darker, windowless cells.
Austin jerks back with a start, instinctively raising his Glock at the precise same moment a huge male biter with a wild gray Rasputin beard unhinges its creaking jaws and pounces at him. Jowls hanging in bloody shreds from a recent gunshot wound, milk-pod eyes flashing with bloodlust, the dead old man tries to gobble Austin’s face as the Glock’s muzzle almost accidentally lodges itself inside the creature’s throat. Austin starts to squeeze the trigger.
“Austin, don’t fire it!” Ben Buchholz hisses at him from the shadows off his right flank. “The noise!—Austin, don’t!”
Blinking with shock, his fever spiking with streaks of painful light across his field of vision, Austin shoves the creature’s huge head against the closest wall. The impact cracks the thing’s skull, but it keeps chewing furiously on the barrel in its mouth as though trying to masticate the gun.
Austin grunts and slams the skull again and again against the wall when a flash of steel streaks across his peripheral vision and a knife blade embeds itself in the thing’s forehead with a watery crunch.
Rotten blood and black fluids gush around the knife’s hilt as Ben Buchholz pulls the blade free, and then he stabs it a second time, and a third, until the thing with the beard collapses to the floor in a bloody mass of blubber and escaping gases.
A moment of edgy silence follows as everybody gets their bearings.
They move on. Austin brings up the rear, moving slowly, the nausea twisting his insides into knots, the fever sending clammy gooseflesh down his back. They creep toward the end of the corridor. Ben and Matthew take the lead, each with a buck knife at the ready. Austin sees Lilly pausing in front of an open cell about twenty-five feet ahead of him. She stares at something inside the cell. The two other men pause and look over her shoulder.
Something’s wrong. Austin can see it in Lilly’s body language, the way she lowers herself to one knee and picks something up off the floor. The other two men wait impatiently for her, saying nothing. Austin approaches and looks over her shoulder.
He sees what has Lilly so transfixed and turns to the other men. “Give us a second, guys,” Austin says to them. “See if you can go secure the door at the end of the hall.”
The two men pad away, scanning the depths of the hallway ahead of them with knives poised and ready. Troubling scratching noises echo. The distant, omnipresent drone of the herd vibrates in the air. The yards are still rife with the dead, the horde surrounding the cellblocks. At the moment, though, the corridor remains still and silent. Austin crouches next to Lilly and puts an arm around her.
A single tear drops off her chin. Her shoulders tremble as she takes in the former sleeping quarters of a child, its former inhabitant evidently abandoning it in a hurry. Across the cinder-block wall over the cot someone has hung a small banner of letters from the alphabet spelling out the name S-O-P-H-I-A. Lilly cradles a small teddy bear in her arms as if it’s a wounded bird—the stuffed animal is missing an eye and its fur is worn down to the nubs from compulsive fondling. On a makeshift dresser of crates in one corner is an old music box.
“Lilly…?”
Austin feels a tremor of fear as Lilly pulls herself away from him and crosses the cell to the dresser. She opens the lid of the music box, and a tinkling melody rattles out of the thing for a moment. Hush, little baby, don’t you cry … Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby. Lilly collapses into a sitting position in front of the music box, her expression crumbling with grief. She sobs. Softly. Uncontrollably. Her body shudders and convulses as she lowers her head. Tears stream down her face, falling to the grubby tile floor. Austin joins her, kneeling next to her, searching for the right thing to say. No words come to him.
He turns away from her, partly out of respect and partly because he can’t bear to see her weep like this. He studies the contents of the cell, patiently trying to give her the space and time to let this horrible grief work its way through her. He sees the child’s things strewn across the floor, on the bed, and on a meager little shelf nailed into the rotted cinder-block wall. He sees Kewpie dolls, arrowheads, leaves pressed onto construction paper, and books—dozens of them—lined along the shelf and shoved under the bed. He studies the titles: The Wizard of Oz, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Eloise, The Phantom Tollbooth, and Matilda.
His gaze lingers on one of the books. His head throbs. His eyes moisten and his stomach clenches with fever chills as he stares and stares at the book’s title. An idea strikes him right then, a way out of this place—A
ustin’s destiny written on the cracked gold-leaf spine of a dog-eared Little Golden Books classic—all of it coalescing in his mind in one great paroxysm of inspiration.
He looks at Lilly. “I promise you, we’re gonna get out of here,” he says in a low, measured, confident tone. “You’re gonna live a long life, have a lot of babies, be a terrific mom, and have a lot of parties with drinks with those little umbrellas in them.”
She manages to raise her head and look at him through wet, swollen eyes. She can barely talk. Her voice sounds drained of life. “What are you babbling about?”
“I got an idea.”
“Austin—”
“It’s a way out of this mess. C’mon. Let’s get the guys together, and I’ll lay it out for you.” He helps her to her feet.
She looks at him, and he returns her gaze, and for the first time since the war began, the love between them returns in earnest. “Don’t argue with me,” he says, giving her a wan smile and ushering her out of the cell.
But before heading back to the receiving room, Austin throws one last fleeting glance into that sad little child’s lair …
… and takes one final look at the threadbare, split, well-thumbed spine of The Pied Piper from Hamelin.
NINETEEN
Less than an hour later, before the sun has even cleared the tall pines to the east, Lilly stands with the others in the musty intake room, waiting for Austin’s signal. She can’t show any emotion. She can’t show her fear, her sorrow, or her anguish over letting Austin execute this insane plan. The five other surviving members of the Woodbury militia—by this point having taken their positions around the room—need to know this is going to work. They are coiled and ready to spring, and each of their frightened gazes rests on Lilly. They need her leadership now more than ever.
Matthew and Speed—the strongest of the six—stand near the giant metal credenza blocking the exit door. Gloria, Hap, and Ben—each clutching their weapons with sweat-slick hands—stand in the center of the room, facing the exit, prepared to move on Lilly’s cue. Lilly has a Ruger pistol in each hand, taking deep breaths on the other side of the credenza, a runner in the blocks, muscles taut with tension, as ready as she’ll ever be.
Nobody knows about the hushed argument that transpired only half an hour ago between Austin and Lilly behind the shattered glass of the intake desk. Nobody heard Lilly pleading with him not to do this. And no one else will ever know what happened when Austin finally broke down and admitted through runnels of snot and tears that he has to do this—he has no choice—because he has always been a coward and a liar, and these attributes only worsened when the plague broke out, and this is the only way he will ever be able to redeem himself, and do something good and right.
He told Lilly then the truest thing—the thing that will live in Lilly’s heart the rest of her life—that she is the only person that he has ever loved, and he will love her for eternity.
The first shot rings out on the far side of the yard, faint and muffled inside the foyer, dampened by walls of brick and mortar.
Everybody in the room bristles, spines stiffening at the noise. Lilly raises one of her guns at the ceiling, getting everyone’s attention. “Okay,” she says. “There’s the first signal. He needs two minutes, and then we head out. Get ready.”
Lacking a stopwatch, Lilly begins counting off the seconds in her head to occupy her thoughts.
One Mississippi … two Mississippi … three Mississippi.
* * *
Austin gets halfway across the exercise yard on the north edge of the grounds—firing off large-caliber attention-grabbers every few seconds in order to draw the swarm away from the cellblocks—when the herd gets too thick.
Dizzy from the harsh sun pounding behind his eyes, in a weakened state from the fever, he manages to kick his way through a cluster of biters on the edge of the fences, but soon the monsters outnumber him three hundred to one. He reaches the mangled wreckage of chain link, taking a few down with headshots—Matthew equipped him with an AK, a full magazine, and a knife—but the moment he plunges into the wall of walkers milling about the tall grass, he gets pinned down.
He spins and strafes a group of ragged monsters coming up behind him, sending flesh and blood into the air in an arabesque of red spray, but when he whirls back toward the meadow, one of the larger males pounces on him and knocks him down. He drops his gun and tries to scuttle back to his feet but the male clamps down on his ankle, rotten bicuspids digging in, latching onto him with the force of grappling hooks. Austin cries out and kicks, to no avail.
Through sheer force of will, he rises back to his feet. With every last shred of strength he can muster, the searing pain spreading through every tendon, every capillary, he starts moving again, the huge male still clamped onto him. He knows, deep down, that this isn’t about destroying creatures—it’s about drawing them away—so he drags the male as far as he can across the leprous meadow.
It’s slow going at first, but he covers nearly twenty-five yards in this manner, hemorrhaging pints of blood, the knife now in his sweat-greasy fist, the pain a living thing inside him, devouring him. He flails and strikes out at more and more attackers coming at him from every direction, screaming as loud as he can, “COME AND GET ME, MOTHERFUCKERS—YOU BUNCH OF STINKING, ROTTEN PUSSIES!!—COME AND GET ME!!”
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the leading edge of the swarm shifting like a black tide rolling back out to sea, many of those who had been snuffling around the buildings now awkwardly turning, bumping into each other, starting to trundle back toward the meadow, drawn by the commotion of fresh meat in their midst.
Austin’s plan is working—at least for the moment. The trick is going to be getting them away from the vehicles. Austin’s body begins to shut down, the male clawing at the place in his legs where the femoral arteries live, ragged arms tangling with his feet, throwing him off stride. He knows he only has a few more minutes left in him, a few more feet, a few more strangled breaths.
“COME AND GET IT, SHITHEADS!! SOUP’S ON!! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!!”
He can see the closest vehicle—a military transport truck—its doors still hanging open, the wind blowing through the empty cab. He manages to drag the monster off to the left of the abandoned caravan another few yards before the pain and the pressure of the creature’s teeth and the clawing fingers drag him to the ground.
He crawls another few feet before more rotting teeth close in, a fogbank of noxious black stench engulfing him, the hellish choir of growls contracting around him like a giant turbine turning and turning. The pain steals his breath, makes his vision grow dim and amorphous, makes the growing number of teeth sinking into his flesh lose all meaning. He hears a whisper in his mind, which drowns the horror, numbs the pain, and turns the black inkblots of a hundred cadaverous faces looming over him into a gauzy blur. The whisper carries him over—takes him across a beautiful pristine-white threshold—as the feeding opens him up: I love you, Austin … and I always, always, always, always will … I will never stop loving you. It is the last thing Lilly said to him this morning, and it is the last thing he hears in his mind as his arteries collapse and spill his life-force into the grass, the blood seeping down into the earth.…
* * *
The giant credenza shrieks across the floor suddenly as the two young men shove it away from the door. Lilly gives Gloria, Hap, and Ben a terse nod—they nod back at her—and Lilly turns to the door, jacks the knob, and throws it open.
The harsh light of a pale sun shines in her face as she steps outside.
Several things register to Lilly as she takes her first loping strides across the concrete deck of the exercise yard—the others following closely, their guns poised, their hot gazes everywhere at once—but she tries to focus solely on the task of getting the group to a vehicle in one piece rather than succumb to the chaotic flow of information now streaming into her brain.
The first thing that occurs to her is the absence of any si
gn of Austin. She scans the grounds, and then surveys the outer fences, and sees only walkers. Where the hell is he? Did he make it to the woods? She leads the group toward the outer fence.
The second thing that registers in Lilly’s churning mind is the dearth of walkers still wandering the grounds. Only a few stragglers still drag across the cement here and there, providing very little threat to a tightly packed group of humans racing across the exercise yard.
Matthew wields the largest knife—and he runs alongside Lilly—keeping an eye on the errant biters that might make note of them.
They cross the sparsely populated grounds in less than a minute, and Matthew has to drive his knife into the decaying craniums of a mere handful of walkers before they get to the pasture.
Which leads to the third thing that registers fully at that point in Lilly’s brain: The configuration of the herd has now spontaneously shifted to the north. Like a teeming mass of ants, they swarm around something dark and glistening on the ground fifty feet from the farthest vehicle.
The noise of the feeding frenzy reaches her ears as she leads the group toward her truck—the massive vehicle still sitting with its cab doors open exactly as she left them the day before—and she calls out to the others as they crane their necks to see the gruesome scene along the north edge of the pasture: “DON’T LOOK!”
Lilly’s voice sounds almost robotic in her own ears—all emotion blanched out of her now by the scalding rush of adrenaline—as she comes around the driver’s side of the cab. She jerks to a stop when she sees the ragged female in a soiled sundress inside the cab, wedged behind the steering wheel, her threadbare dress tangled on the stick shift. Lilly quickly raises her .22 and puts the female out of her misery, sending the back of the girl’s skull across the glass of the passenger door.
Dark blood washes the inside of the windshield as the female sags to the cab floor. Lilly kicks the body toward the door, ripping the dress free. Gloria Pyne reaches in from the passenger side and yanks the body out of the cab, dumping it in the grass.
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