“What’s going on? What’s going on?” Nick keeps repeating as he slams to a stop in the living room. He sees something that doesn’t make any sense. He sees Tara Chalmers with the Ruger pointed at Philip, and Philip with this weird look on his face, and Brian standing a few feet away with Penny drawn close to him, his arms around the little girl in a protective posture. And weirder still: Nick sees their belongings piled on the floor in front of the sofa.
“Move over there,” Tara says, brandishing the gun, and directing Nick toward Philip, Brian, and Penny.
“What’s wrong?”
“Never mind, just do what I say.”
Nick slowly complies but his mind is swimming with confusion. What in God’s name happened here? Almost involuntarily, Nick looks at Philip, looks into the big man’s eyes for answers, but for the first time since Nick has known Philip Blake, the big guy looks almost sheepish, almost blank with indecision and frustration. Nick looks at Tara. “Where’s April? What happened?”
“Never mind.”
“What are you doing? What’s the idea putting of all our stuff in a—”
“Nicky,” Philip chimes in. “Let it go. Tara’s gonna tell us what she wants us to do. And we’re gonna do it, and everything’s gonna be okay.”
Philip says this to Nick but as he’s saying it, he’s looking at Tara.
“Listen to your pal here, Nick,” Tara says, and she too says this to Nick but doesn’t take her gaze off Philip. Her eyes practically glow with contempt and anger and vengeance and something else—something incomprehensible to Nick, something that feels disturbingly intimate.
Now it’s Brian’s turn to pipe in: “What is it you want us to do exactly?”
Tara still doesn’t take her eyes off Philip as she says, “Get out.”
At first, this simple imperative sentence sounds to Nick Parsons like a rhetorical statement. To his stunned ears, it sounds as though she’s not exactly telling them to do something as much as she’s making some kind of a point. But this initial reaction—and maybe hopeful thinking—is immediately short-circuited by the look on Tara Chalmers’s face.
“Hit the road.”
Philip keeps staring at her. “Where I come from, that’s called murder.”
“Call it whatever you want. Just take your shit and go.”
“You’re gonna send us out there without weapons.”
“I’m gonna do more than that,” she says. “I’m gonna climb up on that roof with one of them high-powered pigeon guns and I’m gonna make
After a long, horrible moment of silence, Nick looks at Philip.
And finally, Philip tears his gaze away from the stout, buxom girl with the pistol. “Get your stuff,” he says to Nick, and then to Brian he says, “There’s a rain poncho in my pack, put it on Penny.”
The amount of time it takes them to get dressed and ready to leave is nominal—mere minutes, with Tara Chalmers standing guard like a stone sentry—but it gives Brian Blake plenty of time to wildly ruminate to himself about what could have happened. Tying his boots, and putting the slicker on Penny, he realizes that all indications point to some kind of sick triangle going on. April’s absence speaks volumes. As does Tara’s unmitigated, righteous anger. But what
For a crazy instant, Brian’s mind casts back to his insane ex-wife. Compulsive, volatile, flaky Jocelyn had done stuff like this. She would vanish without a trace for weeks. One time, while Brian was at night school, she actually put all his shit out on the stairs of their tenement building, as though she were removing a stain from her life. But
The thing that bothers Brian the most is the way his brother is behaving. Beneath the surface of his simmering anger and frustration, Philip Blake almost seems
“Come on, let’s roll,” Philip says, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He has his denim jacket on now—the black, oily grime and gore from their earlier journey still visible all over it—and he’s heading toward the door.
“Wait!” Brian says. He turns to Tara. “At least let us take some food. For Penny’s sake.”
She just levels her gaze at him and says, “I’m letting you walk outta here alive.”
“Come on, Brian.” Philip pauses in the doorway. “It’s over.”
Brian looks at his brother. Something about that deeply lined, weathered face is galvanizing to Brian. Philip is family, he’s blood. And they’ve come a long way. They’ve survived too many jams to die now like homeless pets abandoned on the side of the road. Brian feels a strange sensation building in the base of his spine, filling him with an unexpected strength. “Fine,” he says. “If this is the way it has to be…”
He doesn’t finish the sentence—there is nothing more to say—he simply puts an arm around Penny and ushers her out behind her father.
The rain is both a blessing and a curse. It bullwhips across their faces as they emerge from the building’s front entrance, but as they crouch under spindly trees along the parkway to get their bearings, they see that the storm has apparently driven the Biters off the streets. The sewers are flooding, the roads streaming with overflow, and the gray sky hangs low.
Nick squints into the distance to the south, the streets relatively clear. “That way’s best! Most of the safe zones are down there!”
“Okay, we’ll head south,” Philip says and turns to Brian. “Can you piggyback her again? I’m countin’ on you, sport. Watch her back.”
Brian wipes moisture from his face and gives his brother a thumbs-up.
Turning to the child, Brian starts to go about the business of gently lifting her onto his back, but he abruptly stops. For the briefest instant, he just stares in amazement at the little girl. She is also giving a thumbs-up sign. Brian glances at his brother, and the two men acknowledge something beyond words.
Penny Blake just stands there, waiting, chin jutting defiantly. Her soft little eyes are blinking away the rain, and the look on her face is reminiscent of the expression her late mother would often display when impatient with male nonsense. Finally, the child says, “I’m not a baby … can we go now?”
They make their way to the corner, staying low, slipping on the slimy walk, the rain a constant drag on their progress. It gets in their faces and in their clothes and into their joints almost immediately. It’s an icy, needling autumn rain with no signs of slowing down.
Up ahead, a few shabby, cadaverous zombies cluster near an abandoned bus stop, their greasy heads of hair like moss matted across their dead faces. They look like they’re waiting for a bus that will never come.
Philip leads his group across the corner and under an awning. Nick points the way to the first safe zone—the city bus sitting in mothballs half a block south of the pedestrian bridge. A quick hand gesture from Philip, and now they hurry along the storefronts toward the bus.
“I say we go back,” Nick Parsons is grumbling as he crouches down on the floor of the bus and fishes through his backpack. The rain makes a muffled tommy-gun noise on the bus’s roof. Nick finds a T-shirt, pulls it out, and wipes the moisture from his face. “We’re talking about a single girl here—we can take the place back from her—I say we go back and kick her the hell out.”
“Think we can take it from her, huh?” Philip is up in the pilot area, searching the compartments for things left behind by the driver. “You got a bulletproof vest in that backpack of yours?”
The bus—a thirty-foot fuselage of molded seats facing inward along either side—reeks with the ghostly secretions of former passengers, a sort of wet dog-fur smell. In the rear of the bus, resting on the second-to-last seat, with Penny in the seat next to him, Brian shivers in his wet sweatshirt and jeans. He has a bad feeling, and it’s not only because of their exposure to the stormy, urban wilderness of Atlanta.
Brian’s sense of doom has more to do with the mystery of what happened back at the apartment building last night. He can’t stop wondering just exactly what transpired between the hours of 5 P.M. (when Philip and April
