Brian is confused. “You said just for the night, right?”
Philip takes a deep breath. “Yeah, but I’m sorta getting over that idea right now.”
Bobby starts to say, “Yeah, but—”
“Look. I’m just saying. Might be best for us to lay low for a spell.”
“Yeah, but Philly, what about—”
“We could just stay put, Bobby, see what happens.”
Nick has been listening intently to this. “Philip, come on, man, they’ve been saying on the news that the big cities are the safest—”
“The news? Jesus Christ, Nick, blow the wax outta your head. The news is going down the tubes with the rest of the population. Look at this place. You think some government halfway house is gonna have
“We’re so close, though,” Bobby says after a moment’s thought.
Philip sighs. “Yeah, well … close is a relative term.”
“It’s twenty miles, tops.”
“Might as well be twenty
“That ain’t gonna stop us,” Bobby says. His eyes light up. He snaps his fingers. “We’ll build a—whattya call it?—on the front end of the Chevy—a scoop—like in fucking
“Watch your language, Bobby,” Philip says, nodding at the little girl.
Nick speaks up. “Dude, we stay here, and it’s only a matter of time until those things out at the—” He stops himself, glancing at the child. Everybody knows what he’s talking about.
Penny studies her soggy cereal as though she’s not listening.
“These places are solid, Nicky,” Philip counters, setting down the bottle, crossing his muscular arms across his chest. Philip has been giving a lot of thought to the problem of those wandering hoards out on the golf course. The key would be keeping quiet, masking out the light at night, not sending up any signals, or smells, or undo commotion. “As long as we got power, and we keep our wits about us, we’re golden.”
“With one gun?” Nick says. “I mean, we can’t even use it without drawing their attention.”
“We’ll check out the other houses, look for weapons. These rich bastards are big on deer huntin’, maybe we can even find a silencer for the Ruger … hell, we can make one. You see that workshop downstairs?”
“C’mon, Philip. What are we, gunsmiths now? I mean … all we got to defend ourselves right now is a few —”
“Philip’s right.”
Brian’s voice startles everybody—the way it comes out on a hoarse, wheezing tone of certainty. He pushes his cereal away and looks up at his brother. “You’re right.”
Philip is probably the one who is the most taken aback by the conviction in Brian’s nasally voice.
Brian stands up, comes around the table, and stands in the doorway leading into the spacious, well-furnished living room. The lights are off in there, and all the shades are drawn. Brian points toward the front wall. “Basically, the front of the house is the problem. The sides and the back are pretty well protected by that tall fence. The dead don’t seem to be able to, like, penetrate barriers and stuff … and every house on this block has a fenced-in backyard.” For a moment, it looks as if Brian’s going to cough but he holds it in, puts his hand to his mouth for a moment. His hand is shaking. He goes on: “If we can, like, borrow materials from the other yards, other houses, maybe we can secure a wall across the front of the house, maybe across the neighbors’ houses, too.”
Bobby and Nick are looking at each other now, nobody reacting, until Philip finally says with a faint smile, “Leave it to the college boy.”
It’s been a while since the Blake boys have smiled at each other, but now Philip sees that at least his ne’er- do-well brother wants to be useful, wants to do something for the cause, wants to man up. And Brian seems to be absorbing confidence from Philip’s approval.
Nick is unconvinced. “For how long, though? I feel like a sitting duck in this place.”
“We don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Brian says, his voice raw and yet somehow manic. “We don’t know what caused this thing, how long it’s gonna last … they could, like, figure this thing out, come up with an antidote or something … they could drop chemicals from crop dusters, the CDC could contain it … you never know. I think Philip’s totally right. We should cool our jets here for a while.”
“Damn straight,” Philip Blake says with a grin, still sitting with his ropy arms crossed. He gives his brother a wink.
Brian returns the wink with a satisfied little nod, wiping a strand of hair as thick as straw from his eyes. He takes a shallow breath into wheezing lungs and then triumphantly walks over to the bottle of Scotch, which sits on the table next to Philip. Grabbing the bottle with a gusto that he hasn’t shown in years, Brian lifts it to his lips and takes a massive gulp with the victorious swagger of a Viking celebrating a successful hunt.
Instantly, he flinches, doubles over, and lets out a fusillade of coughs. Half the liquor in his mouth goes spraying across the kitchen, and he coughs and coughs and coughs and wheezes furiously, and for a moment, the others just stare. Little Penny is thunderstruck, gawking with her huge eyes, wiping droplets of liquor from her cheek.
Philip looks at his pathetic excuse for a brother and then looks at his buddies. Across the room, Bobby Marsh struggles to stifle a laugh. Nick tries to repress his own twitching grin. Philip tries to say something but can’t help but start laughing, and the laughter is contagious. The others start chortling.
Soon, everybody is laughing hysterically—even Brian—and for the first time since this whole nightmare kicked in, the laughter is genuine: a release of something dark and brittle lurking in all of them.
That night, they try to sleep in shifts. Each one of them gets their own room on the second floor—the remnants of former inhabitants like eerie artifacts in a museum: a bedside table with a half-full glass of water, a John Grisham novel open to a page that will never be finished, a pair of pompoms hanging off a teenage girl’s four- poster bed.
For most of the night, Philip sits watch downstairs, out in the living room, with his gun on a coffee table next to him and Penny tucked under blankets on a sectional sofa beside his chair. The child tries unsuccessfully to fall asleep, and around three in the morning, as Philip finds his mind casting back to those tormented thoughts of Sarah’s accident, he notices out of the corner of his eye that Penny is tossing and turning restlessly.
Philip leans over to her and strokes her dark hair and whispers, “Can’t sleep?”
The little girl has the covers pulled up to her chin, and she looks up at him. She shakes her head. Her ashen face is almost angelic in the orange light of a space heater, which Philip has rigged next to the couch. Outside, in the distant wind, barely audible over the soft drone of the heater, the dissonant chorus of groaning is relentless, like an infernal series of waves lapping a shore.
“Daddy’s here, punkin, don’t worry,” Philip says softly, touching her cheek. “I’ll always be here.”
She nods.
Philip gives her a tender smile. He leans down and plants a kiss on her left eyebrow. “Ain’t gonna let nothin’ happen to you.”
She nods again. She has the little penguin lodged snugly in the crook of her neck. She looks at the stuffed animal and frowns. She moves the penguin to her ear, and she acts as though she’s listening to the animal whisper a secret. She looks up at her father. “Daddy?”
“Yeah, punkin?”
“Penguin wants to know somethin’.”
“What’s that?”
“Penguin wants to know if them people are sick.”
Philip takes a deep breath. “You tell Penguin … yeah, they’re sick all right. They’re more than sick. That’s why we’ve been … puttin’ them outta their misery.”
“Daddy?”
“Yeah?”
“Penguin wants to know if we’re gonna get sick, too.”
Philip strokes the girl’s cheek. “No, ma’am. You tell Penguin we’re gonna stay healthy as mules.”
