them—a male missing an arm, with one eye socket cratered out as black and empty as cancer—trundles quickly toward the big black man, who stands by the window, digging frantically in his pocket. The air fills with a groaning cacophony. Josh finds his Zippo cigar lighter.
Just as the eyeless walker pounces, Josh sparks the butane and flings the lighter at the alcohol-dampened skirt around the bed. Flames blossom immediately, as Josh kicks out at the attacking zombie, sending the cadaver stumbling back across the floor.
The walker bounces across the burning bed and sprawls to the alcohol-sodden carpet as the fire licks up the pilasters. More corpses move in, agitated by the flaring light and heat and noise.
Josh wastes no time spinning around and vaulting back toward the window.
* * *
It takes less than fifteen minutes for the second floor of the glass house to go up, another five minutes for the infrastructure to collapse into itself on a tidal wave of sparks and smoke, the second floor plunging down onto the first, catching the staircase and gobbling through the warren of antiques and expensive floor coverings. The throngs of walkers inside the home are immolated by geysers of flames, the conflagration fueled by the methane of decay oozing off all the reanimated corpses. Within twenty minutes, more than eighty percent of the swarm from the ravine is vanquished in the firestorm, reduced to charred crisps inside the smoking ruins of the stately home.
Oddly, over the course of those twenty minutes, the nature of the house—with its spectacular enclosure of wraparound windows—acts as a chimney, accelerating the blaze but also burning it out quickly. The hottest part of the fire goes straight up, singeing the tops of the trees but containing the damage. The other homes in the area are spared. No sparks are carried on the winds, and the telltale cloud of smoke remains obscured behind the wooded hills, unseen by the citizens of Woodbury.
In the time it takes for the house to burn itself out, Lilly finds enough nerve to vault from the lowest limb of the oak to the roof of the coach house and then climb down the back wall to the rear door of the garage. Josh follows. By that point only a few walkers remain outside the home, and Josh easily dispatches them with the remaining three slugs in the .38’s cylinder.
They get into the garage and find the duffel bag, in which they had stashed some of their previous day’s take for safekeeping. The heavy canvas carryall contains a five-gallon jug of gasoline, a sleeping bag, a drip coffee machine, two pounds of French Roast, winter scarves, a box of pancake mix, writing tablets, two bottles of kosher wine, batteries, ballpoint pens, expensive red current jam, a box of matzo, and a coil of mountain-climbing rope.
Josh reloads the police special with the last six slugs in his speed loader. Then they sneak out the back door with the duffel bag over Josh’s shoulder, and they creep along the outer wall. Crouching in the weeds near the corner of the garage, they wait until the last moving corpse has drifted toward the light and noise of the fire before darting across the property and into the adjacent woods.
They weave their way through the trees without exchanging a word.
* * *
The access road to the south lies deserted in the waning daylight. Josh and Lilly keep to the shadows of a dry creek bed running parallel to the winding blacktop. They head east, down the long sloping landscape, back toward town.
They cover a little more than a mile without speaking, acting like an old married couple in the aftermath of a quarrel. By this point, the fear and adrenaline have finally drained out of them, replaced by a shaky kind of exhaustion.
The near miss of the home attack and ensuing fire has left Lilly in a state of panic. She jumps at noises on either side of the path, and she cannot seem to get enough air into her lungs. She keeps smelling walker stink on the wind, and she thinks she hears shuffling sounds behind the trees, which may or may not be mere echoes of their own weary footsteps.
At last, as they turn the corner at the bottom of Canyon Road, Josh says, “Just let me get one thing straight: Are you saying you’re just using me?”
“Josh, I didn’t—”
“For protection? And that’s it? That’s as far as your feelings go?”
“Josh—”
“Or … are you saying you just don’t want me to
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, baby, I’m afraid you did, that’s exactly what you said.”
“This is ridiculous.” Lilly puts her hands in the pockets of her corduroy jacket as she walks. A layer of grime and ash has turned the fabric of the coat soot gray in the late-afternoon light. “Let’s just drop it. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No!” Josh is slowly shaking his head as he walks. “You don’t get to do that.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shoots a glance at her. “You think this is like a passing thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this is summer camp? Like we’re all gonna go home at the end of the season after losing our virginity and getting poison ivy.” His voice has an edge. Lilly has never heard this tone before in Josh Lee Hamilton’s voice. His deep baritone skirts the fringes of rage, his jutting chin belying the hurt slicing through him. “You don’t get to plant this little bomb and walk away.”
Lilly lets out an exasperated sigh and cannot think of what to say, and they walk in silence for a while. The Woodbury wall materializes in the distance, the far western edge of the construction site coming into view, where the bulldozer and small crane sit idle in the waning light. The construction crew has learned the hard way that zombies—like game fish—bite more in the twilight hours.
At last Lilly says, “What the hell do you want me to say, Josh?”
He stares at the ground as he walks and ruminates. The duffel bag rattles, banging on his hip as he trudges along. “How about you’re sorry? How about you’ve been thinking it over, and maybe you’re just scared of gettin’ close to somebody because you don’t want to get hurt, because you’ve been hurt yourself, and you take it all back, what you said, you take it back and you really love me as much as I love you? How about that, huh?”
She looks at him, her throat burning from the smoke and terror. She is so thirsty. Tired and thirsty and confused and scared. “What makes you think I’ve been hurt?”
“Just a lucky guess.”
She looks at him. Anger tightens in her belly like a fist. “You don’t even know me.”
He looks down at her, his eyes wide and stung. “Are you shittin’ me?”
“We hooked up—what?—barely two months ago. Bunch of people scared out of their wits. Nobody knows
“You gotta be kidding me. All we been through? And I don’t even
“Josh, that’s not what I—”
“You’re putting me on the same level as Bob and the stoner? Megan and them folks at the camp? Bingham?”
“Josh—”
“All them things you said to me this week—what are you saying?—you been lying? You said them things just to make me feel better?”
“I meant what I said,” she murmurs softly. The guilt twists in her. For a brief instant she thinks back to that terrible moment she lost little Sarah Bingham, the undead swarming all over the little girl on those godforsaken grounds outside the circus tent. The helplessness. The paralytic terror that seized Lilly that day. The loss and the grief and the sorrow as deep as a well. The fact is, Josh is correct. Lilly has said things to him in the throes of late- night lovemaking that aren’t exactly true. On some level she loves him, cares for him, has strong feelings … but she’s projecting something sick deep within her, something that has to do with fear.
“That’s just fine and dandy,” Josh Lee Hamilton says finally, shaking his head.
They are approaching the gap in the wall outside town. The entranceway—a wide spot between two uncompleted sections of barricade—has a wooden gate secured at one end with cable. About fifty yards away, a single guard sits on the roof of a semitrailer, gazing in the opposite direction with an M1 carbine on his hip.
