His stubborn cold now settling into his lungs, causing a perpetual wheeze that may or may not be early-stage pneumonia, Brian Blake focuses on the task at hand. He packs three large coolers with food stamped with the furthest expiration dates: smoked lunch meats, hard cheeses, sealed containers of juice and yogurt and soda and mayonnaise. He fills a cardboard box with bread and beef jerky and instant coffee and bottled water and protein bars and vitamins and paper plates and plastic utensils. He decides to throw in an array of chef’s knives: cleavers, serrated knives, and boning knives—for whatever close encounters they might stumble into.
Brian fills another box with toilet paper and soap and towels and rags. He rifles through the medicine cabinets and takes cold remedies and sleeping pills and pain relievers, and while he’s doing this, he gets an idea: something he should do before they depart.
In the basement, Brian finds a small can half full of Benjamin Moore Apple Peel Red and a two-inch horsehair paintbrush. He finds an old three-by-three-foot-square piece of plywood, and quickly but carefully, he writes a message: five simple words in big capital letters, large enough to be seen from a passing vehicle. He nails a couple of short legs on the bottom edge of the sign.
Then he takes the sign upstairs and shows it to his brother. “I think we should leave this outside the gate,” Brian says to Philip.
Philip just shrugs and tells Brian it’s up to him, whatever he wants to do.
They wait until after dark to make their exit. At the stroke of 7 P.M.—with the cold, metallic sun drooping behind the rooftops—they hurriedly pack the Suburban. Working quickly in the lengthening shadows, while monsters swarm against the barricade, they form a sort of bucket brigade, quickly passing suitcases and containers from the side door of the house to the open hatch of the SUV.
They take their original axes with an assortment of additional picks and shovels and hatchets and saws and cutting blades from the toolshed out back. They bring rope and wire and road flares and extra coats and snow boots and fire-starter blocks. They also pack a siphoning tube and as many extra plastic tanks of gasoline as they can fit into the rear storage well.
The Suburban’s tank is currently full—Philip managed to siphon fifteen gallons’ worth earlier in the day from an abandoned sedan in a neighbor’s garage—as they have no clue about the status of local gas stations.
Over the last four days, Philip had discovered a variety of sporting guns in neighboring homes. Rich folks love their duck season in these parts. They love picking off green heads from the luxury of their heated blinds with their high-powered rifles and purebred hounds.
Philip’s old man used to do it the hard way, with nothing but waders, moonshine, and a mean disposition.
Now Philip chooses three guns to stow in vinyl zip-up bags in the rear compartment—one is a .22-caliber Winchester rimfire, and the other two are Marlin Model 55 shotguns. The Marlins are especially useful. They’re known as “goose guns.” Fast and accurate and powerful, the 55s are designed for killing migratory fowl at high altitudes … or, in this case, the bull’s-eye of a skull at a hundred-plus yards.
It’s almost eight o’clock by the time they get the Suburban packed, and get Penny situated in the middle seat. Bundled in a down coat with her stuffed penguin at her side, she seems oddly sanguine, her pale face drawn and languid, as though she were about to visit the pediatrician.
Doors click open and shut. Philip climbs behind the wheel. Nick takes the front passenger seat, and Brian settles in next to Penny in the middle. The sign sits on the floor, pressed against Brian’s knees.
The ignition fires. The growl of the engine carries across the still darkness, making the undead stir on the other side of the barricade.
“Let’s do this quick, y’all,” Philip says under his breath, slamming it into reverse. “Hold on.”
Philip puts the pedal to the floor, and the four-wheel drive digs in.
The gravitational force throws everyone forward as the Suburban roars backward.
In the rearview mirror, the weak spot in the makeshift barricade looms closer and closer until … BANG! The vehicle bursts through the cedar planking and into the dim streetlight of Green Briar Lane.
Immediately, the left rear quarter panel collides with a walking corpse as Philip stands on the brakes and jacks it into drive. The zombie launches twenty feet into the air behind them, doing a limp pirouette in a mist of blood, a piece of its moldering arm detaching and pinwheeling in the opposite direction.
The Suburban blasts off toward the main conduit, smashing through three more zombies, sending them flinging off into oblivion. With each impact, the dull thumping sensations traveling through the chassis—as well as the yellowish buglike smears left on the windshield—make Penny cringe and close her eyes.
At the end of the street, Philip yanks the wheel and screeches around the corner, then pushes north toward the entrance.
A few minutes later Philip barks another order: “Okay, do it quick—and I mean QUICK!”
He slams down on the brakes, making everybody lurch forward in their seats again. They’ve just reached the great entrance gate, visible in a cone of streetlight across a short expanse of shrub-lined gravel.
“This’ll just take a second,” Brian says, grabbing the sign, clicking his door handle. “Leave it running.”
“Just get it done.”
Brian slips out of the car, carrying the big three-by-three sign.
In the cold night air, he hastens across the gravel threshold, his ears hyperalert and sensitive to the distant thrum of groaning noises: They’re coming this way.
Brian chooses a spot just to the right of the entrance gate, a section of brick wall unobstructed by shrubbery, and he positions the sign against the wall.
He sinks the wooden legs into the soft earth to stabilize the board, and then hurries back to the car, satisfied he’s done his part for humanity, or whatever is left of it.
As they drive off, each and every one of them—even Penny—glances back through the rear window at the little square sign receding into the distance behind them:
ALL DEAD
DO NOT
ENTER
FIVE
They head west, slowly, through the rural darkness, keeping their speed down around thirty miles per hour. The four lanes of Interstate 20 are littered with abandoned cars, as the macadam snakes toward the sickly pink glow of the western horizon, where the city awaits like a bruise of light on the night sky. They are forced to weave through the obstacle course of wrecks with agonizing slowness, but they manage to put nearly five miles behind them before things start going wrong.
For most of these five miles, Philip keeps thinking of Bobby and all the things they could have done to save him. The pain and regret are burrowing deep down in the pit of Philip’s gut, a cancer metastasizing into something darker and more poisonous than grief. In order to fight the emotions he keeps thinking of that old trucker’s adage:
For five miles only a handful of dead brush the ghostly edges of their headlights.
Just outside of Conyers they pass a couple stragglers shuffling along the shoulder of the road like blood- spattered AWOL soldiers. Passing the Stonecrest Mall they see a cluster of dark figures hunkered down in a ditch, apparently feasting on some sort of roadkill, either animal or human, impossible to tell in the flickering darkness. But that has been the extent of it—for five miles, at least—and Philip keeps his speed at a steady (but safe) thirty miles per hour. Any slower and they risk hooking a stray monster; any faster and they risk sideswiping the growing number of wrecks and abandoned vehicles cluttering the lanes.
