face because April looks up at him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m … I’m good.” He touches the Band-Aid on his temple where he smacked himself in the collision earlier that day. The Chalmerses dug out their first-aid kit and patched everybody up before dinner. “Tell you what,” Philip says. “You go get some sleep, and in the morning, the boys and I will clear out the upstairs.”
She looks at him for a moment like she’s wondering whether or not to trust him.
The next morning, after breakfast, Philip shows April that his word is good. He enlists Nick, and he grabs extra magazines for the Ruger and a box of shells for one of the Marlins. He shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, and gives a small pickaxe to Nick for close encounters.
Pausing by the door, Philip crouches down to tighten the laces of his logger boots, which are so spattered with mud and gore that they look like they’re embroidered with black and purple thread.
“Y’all be careful up there,” old David Chalmers says, standing in the doorway of the kitchenette. He looks gray and washed out in the morning light, leaning on the metal caddy in which his oxygen tank is mounted. The tube under his nose softly whistles with each breath. “Y’all don’t know what you’re gonna find.”
“Always,” Philip says, tucking his denim shirt inside his jeans, checking the axes for quick and easy access. Nick stands over him, waiting with the goose gun on his shoulder. There’s a taut expression on Nick’s face, a combination of grim determination and excitement.
“Most of ’em will be on the second floor,” the old man adds.
“We’ll clear ’em on out.”
“Just watch yer backs.”
“Will do,” Philip says, rising to his feet and checking the axes.
“I’m coming.”
Philip whirls around to see Brian standing there with a clean T-shirt on—an REM logo on the front, the pride of Athens—and a dour, purposeful expression on his face. He’s cradling one of the shotguns in his arms like it’s a living thing.
“You sure?”
“Hell yeah.”
“What about Penny?”
“The gals will watch her.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on,” Brian says. “You need an extra pair of eyes up there. I’m up for it.”
Philip thinks it over. He glances across the living room and sees his daughter sitting Indian-style on the floor between the two Chalmers women. The ladies are playing crazy eights with a tattered deck of cards, making Penny periodically smile and slap down a card. It’s been a long time since the little girl has smiled. Philip turns to his brother and offers a grin. “That’s the spirit.”
They get up there via the stairs at the end of the first-floor corridor—the elevators at the other end as dead as the zombies—but first they have to tear the wooden bracings off the door. The noise of axe blows and nails squeaking out seems to stimulate movement above them, in the dark chambers behind apartment doors. At one point, Philip passes gas with all the exertion, a reminder of April’s bean dinner from the night before.
“That fart’s gonna wipe out more zombies than any twenty-gauge shell,” Nick comments.
“Hardy-har-har,” Philip says and tears off the last of the bracing planks
On their way up the dark stairwell, Philip says, “Remember, y’all—
“Hardy-har, back atcha,” Nick says, expertly injecting a pair of .20-gauge shells into his goose gun.
They reach the top landing, and find the fire door to the second floor shut tightly. They pause. Brian is shaking.
“Calm down, sport,” Philip tells his brother, noticing the barrel of the shotgun is wavering, trembling slightly. Philip gently pushes the muzzle away from the general vicinity of his ribs. “And try not to accidentally send a ball of that bird shot into one of
“I got it under control,” Brian retorts in a shaky, tense voice, revealing that he obviously has
“Here we go,” Philip says. “And remember, go at them hard and quick.”
A single, fierce kick with the shank of his boot heel sends the door lurching open.
ELEVEN
For a millisecond, they stand there with hearts beating like trip-hammers. Other than a few scattered candy wrappers and empty, broken pop bottles, and one hell of a lot of dust, the second-floor hall—identical to the ground-floor corridor—is empty. Dim daylight shines through the far windows and laces through streaks of dust motes, which cant down across the closed doors: 2A, 2C, and 2E along one side, 2B, 2D, and 2F along the other.
Nick whispers, “They’re all locked inside their places.”
Philip nods. “Gonna be like shooting fish in a damn barrel.”
“Come on, let’s do it,” Brian says unconvincingly. “Let’s get it done.”
Philip glances at his brother, then glances at Nick. “John Rambo here.”
They go over to the first door on the right—2F—and raise the business ends of their guns. Philip snaps the slide on the Ruger.
Then he kicks the door in.
A giant ball of stink punches them in their faces. It is the first thing that registers: a hideous stew of human degradation, urine and feces—and zombie stench—vying for dominance over the sharper odors of rancid food and moldy bathrooms and mildewed clothes. It is so overwhelming and unbearable that it literally drives the men back a half step each.
“Jesus wept,” Nick says in a choked utterance, involuntarily averting his face, as if the stench is a wind blowing at him.
“Still think my fart stinks?” Philip says as he takes a careful step into the reeking shadows of the apartment. He raises the .22.
Nick and Brian follow with shotguns at the ready, eyes wide and shiny with tension.
A moment later, they find four of them in repose, on the floor of a ransacked living room, each one slumped in a corner, slack jawed and catatonic, growling languidly at the sight of intruders, but too stupid or sick or demented to move, as though they have grown weary of their hellish fate and now have forgotten how to use furniture. It’s hard to tell in the gloomy light, especially with their faces all bloated and blackened with mortified flesh, but it looks as though it’s another family: mom and dad and two grown kids. The walls have weird patches of scratch marks, like a giant abstract painting, showing evidence that the things were following some flickering instinct to claw their way out.
Philip goes over to the first one, its shark eyes glimmering as the Ruger looms. The blast sends its brains across the Jackson Pollock of scratch marks behind it. The thing sinks to the floor. Meanwhile, Nick is across the room putting another one out of its misery, the boom of the Marlin like a great dry paper sack popping. Brain matter paints the walls. Philip takes the third one down as it is slowly rising, Nick moving toward the fourth—BOOM!—and the sounds of fluids spattering surfaces are buffered by the ringing in their ears.
Brian is standing ten paces behind them, his gun poised, his spirit drowning inside him on a rising tide of repulsion and nausea. “This is—this is not—” he starts to say, but a flash of movement to his left cuts off his words.
The errant zombie comes at Brian from the depths of a side hallway, plunging out of the shadows like a monstrous clown with a black fright wig and candy eyes. Before Brian even has a chance to identify it as a daughter or girlfriend, dressed in a torn robe with one shriveled breast exposed like a flap of chewed meat, the thing pounces
