in a low, mucousy voice, the old guy says confidentially: “It ain’t the dead things you gotta be mindful of around here … it’s the living.”
The next day, Philip tells Brian and Nick to keep their mouths shut while they’re in Woodbury, stay under the radar, avoid any contact with other residents, refrain from even telling people their names. Thankfully, the apartment serves them well as a temporary refuge. Built in the 1950s, with furnishings at least that old—chipped mirror tile on one wall, a moth-eaten sleeper sofa in the living room, a huge rectangular fish tank next to the TV, brimming with scum and the tiny floating corpses of neglected goldfish—the place has three bedrooms and running water. It smells like rancid cat shit and rotting fish, but as Brian’s dad used to say, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” They find canned goods in the pantries of both apartments, and they decide to stay for a while.
Much to Brian’s amazement, the townspeople leave them alone, as though they are ghosts. Brian can tell that word has spread among the inhabitants of newcomers in their midst, but still, it’s as though the Blakes and Nick are apparitions haunting the broken-down apartment. Which is not too far from the truth. Nick keeps to himself and reads his Bible and doesn’t say much. Philip and Brian, still edgy around each other, also go about their business with minimal conversation. It doesn’t even occur to them to find a vehicle and continue on their southward journey. It feels to Brian like they’ve given up … on getting to the coast, on the future, maybe on each other.
Brian continues to heal, and Philip tends to his own obsession with Penny, stealing away to the hickory grove every chance he gets.
Late one night, Brian hears the apartment door clicking open and shut.
He lies there in bed, listening for nearly an hour, when finally he hears Philip returning in a flurry of shuffling steps and gurgling noises. This is the third night in a row Philip has silently slipped out of the apartment— presumably to check on Penny while the townspeople are asleep—but up until tonight, his return has been as quiet and discreet as his departure. But now Brian can hear Philip breathing heavily out in the living room, murmuring something that is drowned out by watery groaning sounds and the clank of a chain.
Brian climbs out of bed and goes into the living room. He freezes when he sees Philip dragging Penny on her leash, yanking her across the floor like a whipped dog.
For a brief instant, Brian is speechless. All he can do is stare at the little moving corpse in her pigtails and muddy pinafore dress, her feet tracking filth across the apartment floor, and hope that she’s a temporary visitor and not—God forbid—a new roommate.
TWENTY-ONE
“What the hell are you doing?” Brian asks his brother as the dead girl claws at the air with stupid hunger. She fixes her milky eyes on Brian.
“It’ll be okay,” Philip says, yanking his dead daughter toward the back hall.
“You’re not—”
“Mind your own goddamn business.”
“But what if somebody—”
“Nobody saw me,” he says, kicking open the door to the laundry room.
It’s a small, claustrophic chamber of linoleum tile and corkboard walls with a broken-down washer and dryer, and ancient cat litter ground into the seams of the floor. Philip drags the drooling, snarling thing into the corner and attaches her leash to the exposed water pipes. He does this with the firm yet gentle hand of an animal trainer.
Brian watches from the hall, appalled at what he’s seeing. Philip has blankets spread out on the floor and duct-taped to the sharp edges of the washing machine to prevent the Penny-thing from making noise or hurting herself. It’s obvious he’s been preparing for this for a while now. He’s been thinking about it a lot. He rigs a makeshift leather halter—fashioned from a belt and pieces of the leash—around her head, attaching it to the pipes.
Philip goes about his business with the gentle rigor of a caretaker securing a wheelchair for a handicapped child. With the steel separator, he holds the tiny monster at arm’s length and carefully secures the restraints to the wall. All through this, the thing that was once a child snarls and slavers and yanks at her restraints.
Brian stares. He can’t decide whether to turn away, cry, or scream. He gets the feeling that he’s stumbled upon something disturbingly intimate here, and for a brief instant, his racing thoughts cast back to the time he was eighteen years old and visiting the nursing home in Waynesboro to say good-bye to his dying grandmother. He’ll never forget the look on her caretaker’s face. On an almost hourly basis, that male nurse had to clean the shit from the old lady’s backside, and the expression on his face while he did so, with relatives in the room, was horrible: a mixture of disgust, stoic professionalism, pity, and contempt.
That same weird expression is now contorting Philip Blake’s features as he buckles straps around the monster’s little head, carefully avoiding the danger zone around her snapping jaws. He sings softly to her as he works on her shackles—some sort of off-key lullaby that Brian can’t identify.
Eventually, Philip is satisfied with the restraints. He tenderly strokes the top of the Penny-thing’s head, and then kisses her forehead. The girl’s jaws snap at him, missing his jugular by centimeters.
“I’ll leave the light on, punkin,” Philip says to her, speaking loudly, as though addressing a foreigner, before calmly turning and walking out of the laundry room, shutting the door securely behind him.
Brian stands there in the hall, his veins running cold. “You want to talk about this?”
“It’ll be okay,” Philip reiterates, avoiding eye contact as he walks away, heading toward his room.
The worst part is that the laundry room is next door to Brian’s bedroom, and from that moment on, he hears the Penny-thing every night, clawing, moaning, straining against her bonds. She’s a constant reminder of … what? Armageddon? Madness? Brian doesn’t even have the vocabulary for what she represents. The smell is a thousand times worse than cat urine. And Philip spends a lot of time locked inside that laundry room with the dead girl, doing God-knows-what, and it drives the wedge deeper between the three men. Still in the throes of grief and shock, Brian is torn between pity and repulsion. He still loves his brother, but this is too much. Nick has no comment on the matter, but Brian can tell that Nick’s spirit is broken. The silences grow longer between the men, and Brian and Nick begin spending more time outside the apartment, wandering the safe zone, getting to know the dynamics of the inhabitants better.
Keeping a low profile, roaming the periphery of the little frontier enclave, Brian learns that the town is basically broken into two social castes. The first group—the one with the most power—includes anyone with a useful trade or vocation. Brian discovers that this first group features two bricklayers, a machinist, a doctor, a gun- store owner, a veterinarian, a plumber, a barber, an auto mechanic, a farmer, a fry cook, and an electrician. The second group—Brian thinks of them as the Dependents—features the sick, the young, and all the white-collar workers with obscure administrative backgrounds. These are the former middle managers and office drones, the paper pushers and corporate executives who once pulled down six-figure incomes running divisions of huge multinationals—now just taking up space, as obsolete as cassette tapes. With echoes of old sociology courses banging around the back of his mind, Brian wonders if this tenuous, rickety assemblage of desperate souls can ever develop into anything like a community.
The sand in the works appears to be three members of the National Guard, who wandered into Woodbury from a nearby Guard Station a couple of weeks ago and started pushing people around. This little rogue clique— which Brian thinks of as the Bullies—is led by a gung-ho former marine with a flattop haircut and icy blue eyes who goes by the name of Gavin (or “the Major,” as his underlings call him). It only takes a couple of days for Brian to peg Gavin as a sociopath with designs on power and plunder. Maybe the plague made Gavin flip his wig, but over the course of that first week in Woodbury, Brian observes Gavin and his weekend warriors snatching provisions out of the hands of helpless families and taking advantage of several women at gunpoint out behind the racetrack at night.
Brian keeps his distance, and keeps his head down, and as he makes these silent observations about Woodbury’s pecking order, he keeps hearing the name Stevens.
From what Brian can glean from scattered conversations with townspeople, this Stevens gentleman was once an ear, nose, and throat man with his own practice in a suburb of Atlanta. After the turn, Stevens set out for safer
