child and try to keep her distracted. “You want one of those candy bars?”
“Nope.” It comes out of her like the crackle of a pull-string doll, her eyes fixed on all the busted toys.
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
“We got Twinkies,” Brian tells her, trying to fill the silence, trying to keep her talking, trying to keep her occupied. But right now, all Brian can think about is the look on Philip’s face, and the violence in his eyes, and the whole world—
“No, I’m okay,” Penny says. She sees a little Hello Kitty backpack lying in a pile of trash, and she goes over to it. She picks it up, inspects it. “You think anybody would get mad if I took some of these things?”
“What things, kiddo?” Brian looks at her. “You mean the toys?”
She nods.
A stab of sorrow and shame cleaves Brian’s midsection. “Go for it,” he says.
She starts gathering up pieces of trampled dolls and tattered stuffed animals. It looks almost like a ritual to Brian, like a rite of passage for the little girl, as she selects Barbies with missing limbs and teddy bears with torn seams. She slips the injured toys into the knapsack with the care of someone performing triage at a clinic. Brian lets out a sigh.
Right then, Philip’s voice calls out from somewhere deep in the guts of the back hallway, cutting off Brian’s thoughts—he was about to fecklessly offer Penny the sausage stick—and now Brian springs to his feet. “What did he say?”
Across the shop, behind the cash register, Nick perks up. “I don’t know—I didn’t hear.”
“Philip!” Brian starts toward the back curtain, his flesh crawling with nervous tension. “You okay?”
Hasty footsteps shuffle inside the draped doorway, and all at once, the curtain flaps open and Philip is peering out at them with a wild expression contorting his face, somewhere between excitement and mania. “Grab your shit, we just won the Irish fucking sweepstakes!”
Philip takes them down a narrow, dark corridor, past shelves of unopened toys and games, around a corner, and through a security door apparently left unlocked amid the previous occupants’ hurried exodus. Down another narrow hallway, guided by the thin beam of Philip’s penlight, and they come to a fire escape. The metal door is slightly ajar, the shadows of a passageway visible on the other side.
“Get a load of what’s on the other side of our little toy store.” Philip pushes the fire door open with his boot. “Our ticket out of this hellhole.”
The metal door swings wide, and Brian finds himself staring across another narrow hallway at the mirror image of the first fire door.
The metal door across the hall is also ajar, and through the gap Brian sees, cloaked in shadows, rows of gleaming spoked wheels. “Oh my God,” he utters. “Is that what I think it is?”
The space is huge—encompassing the entire corner of the adjacent building’s first floor—lined with reinforced window glass on three sides. Visible through the windows is the street corner outside, where shadowy forms wander aimlessly, drifting through the rain like doomed souls, but
The showroom appears to be untouched by the plague. In the wan, overcast light filtering in through the massive display windows, motorcycles of all makes and models are lined up in four neat rows extending from one end of the dealership to the other. The air smells of new rubber and oiled leather and finely honed steel. The edges of the showroom are carpeted with logo-embroidered pile as lush and new as a fancy hotel lobby. Powerless neon signs hang down at junctures with product legends: Kawasaki, Ducati, Yamaha, Honda, Triumph, Harley-Davidson, and Suzuki.
“You think any of them have gas in them?” Brian turns in a slow three-sixty, taking in the whole of the showroom.
“We got our pick of the litter, sport.” Philip nods toward the rear of the room, past the sales counter and desks and shelves brimming with parts. “They got a workspace back there with a garage out back … we can siphon fuel into any one of them things easy enough.”
Penny stares emotionlessly at the banquet of chrome and rubber. She has the Hello Kitty pack strapped securely to her tiny shoulders.
Brian’s head is swimming. Contrary emotions crash up against each other like whitecaps—excitement, anxiety, hope, fear. “Only one problem,” he utters under his breath, the weight of his anguish and uncertainty pressing down on his shoulders.
Philip looks at his brother. “What the hell’s the problem now?”
Brian wipes his mouth. “I have no idea how to work one of those things.”
They all have a much-needed laugh—nervous, brittle laughter, perhaps, but laughter nonetheless—at the expense of Brian. Philip assures his brother that it doesn’t make one lick of difference that Brian has never ridden a motorcycle—a “retard” could learn it in two minutes. More importantly, both Philip and Nick have owned hogs over the years, and the last time Philip checked, there was only four of them, so the two nonoperators can ride along on the saddles.
“Faster we get outta A-T-L, the better chances we got with no guns,” Philip says minutes later, rifling through a rack of leathers in the rear corner of the store—jackets, trousers, vests, and accessories. He chooses a bomber-brown Harley jacket and a pair of heavy-duty black boots. “I want everybody changed outta their wet clothes and ready to go in five minutes—Brian, you help Penny.”
They get changed as the rain eases up outside the big windows. The street corner crawls with shambling figures now—scores of frayed, tattered souls, some of them scorched from the explosion, others in advanced stages of decomposition. Faces are starting to cave in, some of them dripping with parasites and blackening into moldy masks of putrefied flesh. None of them, however, notices the movement inside the dark showroom.
“You see them Biters gathering out there?” Nick says to Philip under his breath. Nick already has dry clothes on, and is zipping up a black leather jacket. He gives a little nod toward the gray light of the storefront. “Some of them things are pretty ripe.”
“So?”
“Some of them got—what?—three, four weeks on ’em?”
“At least.” Philip thinks about it for a moment, changing out of his wet denims. His underwear is stuck to him and he has to practically peel it off. He turns away so that Penny doesn’t see his package. “Whole thing broke out over a month ago … so what?”
“They’re rotting.”
“Huh?”
Nick lowers his voice so that he doesn’t catch Penny’s ear; the little girl is busying herself across the showroom with a size small winter coat, which Brian is trying to figure out how to snap. “Think about it, Philly. The normal course of affairs, a dead body is dust in a year or so.” He lowers his voice further. “Especially one that’s exposed to the elements.”
“What are you saying, Nick? All we gotta do is wait out the clock? Let the maggots do the work?”
Nick shrugs. “Well, yeah, I guess I just thought—”
“Listen to me.” Philip jabs a finger in Nick’s face. “Keep your theories to yourself.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“They ain’t going away, Nicky. Get that through your thick fucking skull. I don’t want my daughter hearing any of this shit. They eat the living, and they reproduce, and when they rot away, there’s gonna be more of them to take their place, and judging from the fact that old man Chalmers turned without even getting bit, the whole goddamn world’s days are numbered, so drink up, bubba, it’s later than y’all think.”
Nick looks down. “All right, man, I get it … cool down, Philly.”
At this point, Brian has Penny bundled up, and the two of them come over. “We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”
“What time you got?” Philip asks Brian, who looks semiridiculous in a Harley leather jacket that’s a size and
