Lilly jumps when the boom of the 9-millimeter in Philip Blake’s hand echoes. The boy’s head erupts, and the body sags immediately.
* * *
“I don’t like this place, Josh, not even a little.” Lilly sits on the Ram’s rear bumper, sipping tepid coffee from a paper cup.
Darkness has fallen on their second evening in Woodbury and already the town has absorbed Megan, Scott, and Bob into its folds like a multicelled organism living off fear and suspicion, acquiring new life-forms on a daily basis. The town leaders have offered the newcomers a place to live—a studio apartment above a boarded-up drugstore at the end of Main Street—well outside the walled-in area but high enough above street level to be safe. Megan and Scott have already moved much of their stuff up there and have even bartered their sleeping bags for a nickel’s worth of locally grown weed.
Bob has stumbled upon a working tavern inside the safe zone, and already has traded half his rations of Walmart products for a few drink tickets and a little drunken camaraderie.
“I’m not crazy about this place myself, babydoll,” Josh concurs as he paces behind Bob’s camper, his breath showing in the cold. His huge hands are oily with bacon grease from the dinner he just prepared on the camper’s Coleman stove, and he wipes them on his lumberjack coat. He and Lilly have been sticking close to the Ram all day, trying to decide what to do. “But we ain’t looking at a lot of options right now. This place is better than the open road.”
“Really?” Lilly shivers in the cold and clutches at the collar of her down coat. “You sure about that?”
“At least it’s safe.”
“Safe from what? It’s not the walls and the fences keeping things out I’m worried about…”
“I know, I know.” Josh lights a stogie and puffs a few swirls of smoke. “It’s wound pretty tight around here. But it’s pretty much like this everywhere you go nowadays.”
“Jesus.” Lilly shivers some more and sips her coffee. “Where’s Bob, anyway?”
“Hanging out with them geezers at the taproom.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Josh goes over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Lil. We’ll rest up, we’ll stockpile some stuff … I’ll do some work in trade … and we’ll get outta here by the end of the week.” He tosses his stogie and sits next to her. “I won’t let anything happen.”
She looks at him. “Promise?”
“Promise.” He kisses her cheek. “I’ll protect you, girlie-girl. Always. Always…”
She kisses him back.
He puts his arms around her and kisses her on the lips. She wraps her arms around his thick neck and things begin to happen. His enormous tender hands find the small of her back, and their kiss turns to something hotter, more desperate. They intertwine, and he urges her back inside the camper, into the private darkness.
They leave the rear hatch open, oblivious to everything but each other, as they begin to make love.
It’s better than either one of them dreamed it would be. Lilly loses herself in the murky dark, the light of an icy harvest moon shining in through the gap, as Josh lets all his lonely desire pour out in a series of heaving gasps. He sheds his coat, gets his undershirt off—his skin looks almost indigo in the moonlight. Lilly peels her bra up and over herself, the soft weight of her breasts splaying across her rib cage. Gooseflesh spreads down her tummy as Josh gently enters her and builds steam.
They make feverish love. Lilly forgets everything, even the savage environment outside the camper.
A minute, an hour—time is meaningless now—all of it passes in a blur.
* * *
Later, they lie among the detritus of Bob’s camper, legs intertwined, Lilly’s head against the massive curve of Josh’s bicep, a blanket covering them, staving off the chill. Josh presses his lips against the soft convolutions of Lilly’s ear and whispers, “Gonna be okay.”
“Yeah,” she murmurs.
“We’re gonna make it.”
“Absolutely.”
“Together.”
“You got that right.” She lays her right arm across Josh’s massive chest, and she looks into his sad eyes. She feels strange. Buoyant, woozy. “Been thinking about this moment for a long time.”
“Me, too.”
They let the silence engulf them, carrying them away, and they lie there like that for some time, unaware of the dangers lying in wait … unaware of the brutal outside world tightening its grasp.
Most important, they are unaware of the fact that they are being watched.
NINE
On their third day in town, the winter rains roll in, drawing a dark gray pall of misery down over Woodbury. It’s already early December and Thanksgiving has come and gone without so much as a wishbone being snapped, and now the dampness as well as the cold starts getting into people’s joints. The sandy lots along Main Street turn to wet plaster and the sewers swell and overflow with tainted runoff. A human hand bubbles out of one of the gratings.
That day Josh decides to trade his best chef’s knife—a Japanese Shun—for bed linens and towels and soap, and he convinces Lilly to move her things into the apartment over the dry cleaner, where they can take sponge baths and find temporary refuge from the cramped quarters of the camper. Lilly stays indoors most of the day, fervently writing diary entries on a roll of wrapping paper and planning her escape. Josh keeps a close eye on her. Something feels wrong—more wrong than he can articulate.
Scott and Megan are nowhere to be found. Lilly suspects that Megan, already growing bored with Scott, is prostituting herself for dope.
That afternoon Bob Stookey finds a couple of kindred spirits in the bowels of the racetrack, where a labyrinth of cinder-block storage facilities and service areas has been turned into a makeshift infirmary. While the cold-steel rain pummels the metal beams and stanchions of the arena above them—sending a dull, hissing, incessant drone down through the bones of the building—a middle-aged man and a young woman give Bob the grand tour.
“Alice here has been a quick study as a neophyte nurse, I have to say,” the man in the wire-frame reading glasses and stained lab coat comments, as he leads Bob and the young lady through an open doorway and into a cluttered examination room. The man’s name is Stevens, and he’s a trim, intelligent, wry sort who seems out of place to Bob in this feral town. The ersatz nurse, also in a hand-me-down lab coat, looks younger than her years. Her dishwater-blond hair is braided and pulled back from her girlish face.
“I’m still working at it,” the girl says, following the men into the dimly lit room, the floor humming with the vibrations of a central generator. “I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of second-year nursing school.”
“Both y’all know a lot more than I do,” Bob admits. “I’m just an old battle tech.”
“She had her baptism of fire last month, God knows,” the doctor says, pausing next to a battered X-ray machine. “Business was brisk down here for a while.”
Bob looks around the room, sees the bloodstains and the signs of chaotic triage, and he asks what happened.
The doctor and the nurse share an uneasy glance. “Changeover in power.”
“Excuse me?”
The doctor sighs. “Place like this, you see a kind of natural selection going on. Only the pure sociopaths survive. It’s not pretty.” He takes a breath, and then smiles at Bob. “Still, it’s good to have a medic around.”
Bob wipes his mouth. “Not sure how much help I’d be, but I gotta admit, it sure would be nice to lean on the skills of a real doctor for once.” Bob motions at one of the old, battered machines. “I see y’all got an old Siemens machine there, used to truck one of those around Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not exactly Bellevue but we’ve got the basics, scavenged them from area clinics … got infusion pumps, IV drips, a couple monitors, ECG, EEG … we’re light on the pharmacy, though.”
Bob tells them about the medicine he scavenged from Walmart. “You’re welcome to any or all of it,” he says.
