darkness of the attic, he sees the silhouette of a figure across the narrow space.
Before Philip even has a chance to shine his flashlight on his brother, the situation becomes clear.
“It’s a tanning bed,” the voice says, making Brian jump. For the past few seconds, Brian Blake has been paralyzed with terror, standing ten feet away from the dusty, oblong enclosure shoved up against one wall of the attic. The top of the thing is latched shut like a giant clamshell, and something scratches to get out of it.
Brian jerks around and finds in the beam of his flashlight his brother’s gaunt, sullen face. Philip stands on the threshold of the attic with the axe in his right hand. “Move away from it, Brian.”
“You think it’s—”
“The missing kid?” Philip whispers, cautiously moving toward the object. “Let’s find out.”
The scratching noise, as if stimulated by the sound of voices, surges and rises.
Brian turns toward the tanning bed, braces himself, and raises the baseball bat. “He might have been hiding up here when he turned.”
Philip approaches with the axe. “Get outta the way, sport.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Brian says bitterly, moving toward the latch, his baseball bat poised.
Philip gently steps in between his brother and the tanning bed. “You don’t have to prove nothing to me, man. Just move outta the way.”
“No, goddamnit, I got this,” Brian hisses, reaching for the dusty latch.
Philip studies his brother. “Okay, whatever. Go for it, but do it quick. Whatever it is—don’t think about it too much.”
“I know,” Brian says, grasping the latch with his free hand.
Philip stands inches behind his brother.
Brian unlatches the enclosure.
The scuttling noises cease.
Philip raises the axe as Brian throws open the lid.
Two quick movements—a pair of blurs in the darkness—shoot across Philip’s sight line: a rustling of fur and the arc of Brian’s bat.
It takes a second or two for the animal to register in Philip’s heightened senses—the mouse darting out of the glare of the flashlight and scurrying across the fiberglass trough toward a hole gnawed in one corner.
The baseball bat comes down hard, missing the fat, oily-gray rodent by a mile.
Pieces of the bed’s switch panel and old toys shatter at the impact. Brian lets out a gasp and recoils at the sight of the mouse vanishing down the hole, slithering back into the inner workings of the bed’s base.
Philip lets out a sigh of relief and lowers the axe. He starts to say something when he hears a little metallic tune playing in the shadows next to him. Brian looks down, breathing hard.
A little jack-in-the-box, thrown by the impact of the bat, lies on the floor.
Triggered by the fall, the tinny music plays a few more notes of a circus lullaby.
Then the toy clown pops out—sideways—from the fallen metal container.
“Boo,” Philip says wearily, with very little humor in his voice.
Their moods improve slightly the next morning after a huge breakfast of scrambled eggs and slab bacon and grits and ham and griddlecakes and fresh peaches and sweet tea. The fragrant melange fills with entire house with the welcoming odors of coffee and cinnamon and smoked meats sizzling. Nick even makes his special redeye gravy for the group, which sends Bobby into ecstasy.
Brian finds cold remedies in the master bedroom medicine cabinet and starts feeling a little better after he downs a few DayQuil capsules.
After breakfast, they explore the immediate vicinity—the single square block known as Green Briar Lane—and they get more good news. They find a treasure trove of supplies and building materials: woodpiles for fireplaces, extra planking under decks, more food in the neighbors’ refrigerators, cans of gas in the garages, winter coats and boots, boxes of nails, liquor, blowtorches, bottled water, a shortwave radio, a laptop, a generator, stacks of DVDs, and a gun rack in one of the basements with several hunting rifles and boxes of shells.
No silencer; but beggars can’t be choosers.
They also get lucky in the undead department. The houses on either side of the Colonial are empty; their residents evidently got the hell out of Dodge before the shit had gone too far down. Two houses away from the Colonial, on the west side, Philip and Nick encounter an elderly couple who have turned, but the oldsters are easily, quickly, and most importantly,
That afternoon, Philip and company cautiously begin work on the barricade across the front parkway of the Colonial and its two neighbors—a total span of a hundred and fifty feet for the three lots, and sixty down either side—which sounds to Nick and Bobby like a daunting amount of territory to cover, but with the ten-foot-long prefab sections they find under a neighbor’s deck, combined with fencing cannibalized off the place across the street, the work goes surprisingly fast.
By dusk that evening, Philip and Nick are connecting the last sections on the northern edge of the property line.
“I’ve been keeping an eye on ’em all day,” Philip is saying, pressing the forked tip of the nail gun against the bracing of a corner section. He’s referring to the swarms out near the golf club. Nick nods as he butts the two support beams against each other.
Philip pulls the trigger, and the nail gun makes a muffled snapping noise—like the crack of a metal whip— sending a six-inch galvanized nail into the boards. The nail gun is baffled with a small piece of packing blanket, secured with duct tape, to dampen the noise.
“I ain’t seen a single one of them wander closer,” Philip says, wiping the sweat from his brow, moving to the next section of support beams. Nick holds the boards steady, and the tip presses down.
“I don’t know,” Nick says skeptically, moving to the next section, the sweat making his satin roadie jacket cling to his back. “I still say it’s not
“You worry too much, son,” Philip says, moving to the next section of planking, tugging on the gun’s cord. The extension cable snakes off toward an outlet on the corner of the neighbor’s house. Philip had to connect a grand total of six twenty-eight-foot cords to get the thing to reach. He pauses and glances over his shoulder.
About fifty yards away, in the backyard of the Colonial, Brian pushes Penny in a swing. It’s taken a little getting used to for Philip, putting his hapless brother in charge of his precious little girl, but right now Brian is the best nanny he’s got.
The play set—of course—is deluxe. Rich folks love to spoil their kids with shit like this. This one—more than likely a haunt of the missing kid—has got all the bells and whistles: slide, clubhouse, four swings, climbing wall, jungle gym, and sandbox.
“We got it made here,” Philip goes on, turning back to his work. “Long as we keep our heads screwed on straight, we’re gonna be fine.”
As they position the next section, the rustling sounds of their movements and the creak of the planks mask the telltale noise of shuffling footsteps.
The footsteps are coming from across the street. Philip doesn’t hear them until the errant zombie is close enough for its odor to register.
Nick is the first one to smell it: that black, oily, mildewy combination of rotting protein and decay—like human waste cooking in bacon grease. It immediately puts Nick’s guard up. “Wait a minute,” he says, holding a section of planking. “You smell—”
“Yeah, smells like—”
A fish-belly arm bursts through a gap in the fencing, grabbing a hank of Philip’s denim shirt.
The assailant was once a middle-aged woman in a designer running suit, now an emaciated wraith with torn sleeves, blackened, exposed teeth, and the button eyes of a prehistoric fish, her hooked hand clutching Philip’s
