darkness … he’s still my brother and he’s our best chance of survival.”
Nick looks at him. “Is that what we’re calling it now? Survival?”
“You want to stay here, be my guest.”
“Thanks, I’ll do that.”
Nick walks away, leaving Brian to turn back to the window and nervously watch his brother.
Utilizing a radiator hose as a siphon, they consolidate all the fuel on the property—from tractors, from vehicles, even from the Harleys—into the Ford S-10. All told, they’re able to top off the seventeen-gallon tank and then some. Philip arranges a place for Penny in the rear cargo bay by moving the boxes of supplies around into a semicircle and laying blankets down on the deck. He chains her to a U-bolt so she can’t get herself into any mischief or fall over the side.
Nick watches all this from his second-floor window, pacing the room like a caged animal. The reality of the situation starts to set in. He’ll be alone in this big old drafty villa. He’ll spend nights alone. He’ll spend the whole winter alone. He’ll hear the north winds shrieking through the gutters and the distant moaning of Biters wandering the orchards … all while biding his time alone. He’ll wake up alone and eat alone and forage for food alone and dream of better days alone and pray to God for deliverance … all by himself. As he watches Philip and Brian finish up the last of the preparations for departure, a twinge of regret tightens Nick’s midsection—
It takes him a matter of seconds to stuff his essentials into a duffel bag.
He rushes out of the room and takes the stairs two at a time.
Brian is just settling into the passenger seat, and Philip is just putting the truck in gear, just beginning to pull away from the villa, when the sound of the front door ripping open reaches their ears.
Brian glances over his shoulder and sees Nick with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, running across the front parkway, waving them back.
It’s hard to believe that Philip would neglect to check under the pickup’s hood. Had he taken three minutes to make sure everything was in working order, he would have found the perforated hose. But Philip Blake is not exactly a hundred percent these days. His mind is a shortwave radio tuned to different stations now.
But regardless of whether it was a deliberate cut made by the home invaders after the firefight broke out (to ensure that nobody escaped), or it was a piece of flak that had pierced the truck’s grill, or it was simply a coincidental failure, the pickup begins to smoke and sputter less than five miles from the villa.
At a point approximately fifty miles southwest of Atlanta, in a place most folks around these parts call the Middle of Nowhere, the pickup hobbles off the highway and onto the gravel shoulder, where it stutters to a stop, all the warning lights across the dash flickering on. White vapor seeps out from under the hood, and the ignition won’t turn over. Philip lets out an alarming barrage of profanity, nearly kicking his logger boot through the floor. The other two men look down, silently waiting for the squall to pass. Brian wonders if this is what a battered wife feels like: too afraid to escape, too afraid to stay.
At length, Philip’s tantrum passes. He gets out and opens the hood.
Brian joins him. “What’s the verdict?”
“Screwed and tattooed.”
“No hope of fixing it?”
“You got a radiator hose on you?”
Brian glances over his shoulder. The side of the road slopes down to a ravine filled with old tires, weeds, and rubbish. Movement draws his gaze to the far end of the ravine—about a quarter of a mile away—where a cluster of Biters mill about in the garbage. They stumble around and root for flesh in the rocks like truffle-nuzzling pigs. They haven’t yet noticed the disabled vehicle now smoking on the side of the road three hundred yards away.
In the rear of the pickup, Penny yanks at her chain. The chain is threaded through her dog collar and bolted to the corrugated deck. The proximity of other upright corpses seems to be tweaking her, exciting her, disturbing her.
“What do you think?” Brian finally asks his brother, who has carefully lowered the hood and clicked it shut with a minimum of noise.
Nick is climbing out of the cab. He joins them. “What’s the plan?”
Brian looks at him. “The plan is … we’re fucked.”
Nick chews his fingernail, glancing back over his shoulder at the zombie conclave slowly working its way down the ravine, getting closer every minute. “Philip, we can’t sit here. Maybe we can find another car.”
Philip exhales a pained sigh. “All right, you fellas know the drill … grab your shit, I’ll get Penny.”
They light out with Penny on the leash, their backs laden with supplies. They hug the shoulder, following the highway. Brian limps along without complaint, despite the stabbing pain in his hip. Around Greenville, they have to take a detour due to an inexplicable pileup of wrecked vehicles, the scorched tangle of metal spanning across both northbound and southbound lanes, the area crawling with zombies. From a distance, it looks as though the earth itself has split open and vomited up hundreds of walking corpses.
They decide to take a two-lane—Rural Route 100—which wends its way southward, through Greenville, and around the congestion. And they get maybe a mile or two before Philip puts his hand up and stops.
“Hold on a second,” he says, frowning. He cocks his head. “What is that?”
“What is
“That noise.”
“What noise?”
Philip listens. They all listen. Philip turns in a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the direction from which the sound is coming. “Is that an engine?”
Brian hears it now. “Sounds like a fucking tank.”
“Or maybe a bulldozer,” Nick ventures.
“What the fuck.” Philip narrows his eyes as he listens. “That can’t be too far away.”
They continue on. Less than a mile down the road, they come upon a dented sign:
WOODBURY—1 MI.
They continue on down the road, all eyes on the smoke-clogged western sky.
“Whoever they are, they got fuel,” Nick says.
Brian sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. “You think they’re friendly?”
“I ain’t taking any chances,” Philip says. “C’mon … we’ll find a back way in, take it one step at a time.”
Philip leads them across the shoulder, then down a weedy slope.
They scuttle across an adjacent farm field, a vast and fallow valley of soft earth. Their boots sink into the mire as they go. The chill wind lashes at them, and it takes them an interminable amount of time to circumnavigate the outskirts before the remnants of an abandoned town begin to materialize ahead of them.
A Walmart sign rises above a stand of ancient live oaks. The golden arches of a McDonald’s are visible not far beyond the Walmart. Litter tumbles down empty streets, past postwar brick buildings and cookie-cutter condos. But on the north side of the town, within a maze of cyclone fences, the sounds of engines and hammering and the occasional voice reveal the presence of humans.
“Looks like they’re building a wall or somethin’,” Nick says as they pause under the cover of trees. In the distance, about two hundred yards away, a handful of figures labor over a tall wooden rampart closing off the north edge of town. The barricade already stretches nearly two blocks.
“Rest of the place looks dead,” Philip comments. “Can’t be many survivors.”
“What the hell is that?” Brian is pointing at a semicircle of high stanchions a few blocks west of the barricade. Clusters of arc lights point down at a large open space, obscured behind buildings and fences.
“Football field for the high school maybe?” Philip is reaching for his Glock. He pulls it out and checks the remaining rounds in the magazine. He’s got six hollow-points left.
“What are you thinking, Philip?” Nick looks anxious, jittery.
