their bedrolls on the linoleum tiles.
The previous occupant must have practically lived in the little two-hundred-square-foot crow’s nest, because there are CDs, a stereo, a microwave, a small refrigerator (the food inside it mostly spoiled), drawers full of candy bars, work orders, half-full liquor bottles, office supplies, fresh shirts, cigarettes, check stubs, and porn.
Philip hardly says a word the whole night. He just sits near the window overlooking the warehouse floor, occasionally taking a swig of whiskey from the pint bottle he found in the desk, while Nick sits on the floor in the opposite corner, silently reading a small Concordance Bible by the light of a lantern. Nick claims he carries the little dog-eared leather-bound book wherever he goes; but the others have rarely seen him reading it … until now.
Brian forces down some tuna fish and saltine crackers, and he tries to get Penny to eat something but she won’t. She seems to be drawing further into herself, her eyes now displaying a permanent glaze that looks vaguely catatonic to Brian. Later, Brian sleeps next to her, while Philip dozes in the swivel chair by the greasy wire-mesh window, through which past foremen have kept their eyes peeled for loafers. This is the first time Brian has seen his brother too consumed by his own thoughts to sleep next to his daughter, and it does not bode well.
The next morning, they awaken to the sounds of dogs barking somewhere outside.
The dull, pale light floods in through the high windows, and they pack quickly. Nobody has any appetite for breakfast so they use the bathroom, tape their feet to ward against blisters, and put on extra socks. Brian’s heels are already sore from the few miles they’ve trekked, and there’s no telling how far they will go today. They each have one change of clothes, but nobody has the energy to put on anything clean.
On their way out, each one of them—except Philip—studiously avoids looking at the bodies lying in pools of gore in the warehouse.
Philip seems galvanized by the sight of corpses illuminated by daylight.
Outside, they discover the source of the barking. About a hundred yards west of the warehouse a pack of strays—mostly mutts—are fighting over something pink and ragged on the ground. As Philip and the others approach, the dogs scatter, leaving the object of their attentions in the mud. Brian identifies the object as they pass, and softly gives Penny the code word:
The thing is a severed human arm, chewed so badly it looks like it belongs to a wet rag doll.
“Don’t look, punkin,” Philip mutters to his daughter, and Brian pulls Penny next to him, covering the girl’s eyes.
They trudge westward, moving silently, their footsteps furtive and careful like thieves creeping through the morning sun.
They follow a road called Snapfinger Drive, which runs parallel to the interstate. The blacktop ribbon winds through barren forest preserves, abandoned residential villages, and ransacked strip malls. As they move through increasingly populated areas, the side of the road holds horrors that no little girl should ever see.
A high school football field is strewn with headless torsos. A mortuary has been hastily boarded and nailed shut
The highway—visible up along a ridge a hundred yards to their left—crawls with the dead. Every so often the tattered remains of a person will cross through the distant pale rays of the rising sun, causing Philip to motion for everybody to get the hell down and stay quiet. But despite the arduous process of ducking behind trees or wreckage every time they sense another presence looming nearby, they cover quite a bit of ground that day.
They encounter no other survivors.
Late that afternoon, the weather turns clear and sunny—ironically, a fine early autumn afternoon in any other context—the temperature in the low sixties. By five o’clock, the men are sweating, and Penny has tied her sweatshirt around her waist. Philip calculates their progress, subtracting a thirty-minute rest for lunch, and he figures that they’ve averaged about a mile an hour—crossing nearly eight miles of suburban wilderness.
Still, none of them realizes how close they are to the city until they come upon a muddy hillock rising out of the pines just west of Glenwood, where a Baptist church sits on a ridge, smoldering from a recent conflagration, its steeple a smoking ruin.
Exhausted, drained, and hungry, they follow the winding road up the grade to the top of the hill; and when they reach the church parking lot, they all stand there for a moment, gazing out at the western horizon, frozen with a sort of unexpected awe.
The skyline, only three miles away, looks almost radiant in the fading light.
For boys growing up within a couple hundred miles of the great capital of the New South, Philip and Brian Blake have spent precious little time in Atlanta. For the two and half years that he drove trucks for Harlo Electric, Philip occasionally made deliveries there. And Brian has seen his share of concerts at the Civic Center, the Earl, the Georgia Dome, and the Fox Theater. But neither man knows the town well.
As they stand on the edge of that church parking lot, with the acrid smell of the apocalypse in their sinuses, the skyline in the hazy distance reflects back at them a sort of unattainable grandeur. In the dreamy light they can see the capitol spire with its golden-clad dome, the mirrored monoliths of the Concourse Complex, the massive Peachtree Plaza towers, and the pinnacle of the Atlantic building, but it all seems to give off an air of
Brian is about to say something about the place being so close and yet so far—or perhaps make a comment about the unknowable condition of the streets down below—when he sees a blur out of the corner of his eye.
“Look!”
Penny has darted away, unexpectedly and quickly, her voice shrill with excitement.
“PENNY!”
Brian starts after the little girl, who is scurrying across the western edge of the church parking lot.
“GRAB HER!” Philip calls out, chasing after Brian, who is charging after the girl.
“Lookit! Lookit!” Penny’s little legs are churning frantically as she darts toward a side street, which winds along the far side of the hill. “It’s a policeman!” She points as she runs. “He’ll save us!”
“PENNY, STOP!”
The little girl scurries around an exit gate and down the side road. “He’ll save us!”
Brian clears the end of the fence at a dead run, and he sees a squad car about fifty yards away, parked on the side of the road under a massive live oak. Penny is approaching the royal blue Crown Victoria—the Atlanta Police decal on the door, the trademark red swoosh, and the light bar mounted on the roof—a silhouette hunched behind the wheel.
“Stop, honey!”
Brian sees Penny pausing suddenly outside the driver’s door, panting with exertion, staring in at the man behind the wheel.
By this point, Philip and Nick have caught up with Brian, and Philip zooms past his brother. He charges up to his little girl and scoops her off the ground as though pulling her out of a fire.
Brian reaches the squad car and looks in the half-open driver’s side window.
The patrolman was once a heavyset white man with long sideburns.
Nobody says anything.
From her father’s arms, Penny gapes through the car window at the dead man in uniform straining against his shoulder strap. From the looks of his badge and his garb, as well as the word TRAFFIC emblazoned on the front quarter panel of the vehicle, he was once a low-level officer, probably assigned to the outer regions of the city, feeding stray cars to the impound lots along Fayetteville Road.
Now the man twists in his seat, imprisoned by a seat belt he cannot fathom, openmouthed and drooling at the fresh meat outside his window. His facial features are deformed and bloated, the color of mildew, his eyes like tarnished coins. He snarls at the humans, snapping his blackened teeth with feral appetite.
“Now that’s just plain pathetic,” Philip says to no one in particular.
“I’ll take her,” Brian says, stepping closer and reaching for Penny.
