kneels by the sheet-draped body, loading a .45 caliber semiautomatic with a fresh magazine. His face grim and set, he breathes deeply, preparing to complete some distasteful task. He ignores the commotion behind him.
“LET GO!” Lilly keeps writhing in the portly man’s grip, her gaze locked on the body.
“Calm down,” Gabe hisses. “You’re making this harder than it has to—”
“Let her go!”
The deep, cigarette-cured voice comes from behind Gabe, and both Lilly and the heavyset man freeze as though startled by an ultrasonic whistle.
They glance over their shoulders and see the Governor standing inside the circle of onlookers with his hands on his hips, his twin pearl-handled army .45s thrust into either side of his belt, gunslinger-style, his long rock-star hair—as black as India ink—bound in a ponytail and tossing in the wind. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, and the lines chiseling his sunken jowls, deepen and crease and grow more prominent as his expression darkens. “It’s okay, Gabe … let the lady say good-bye to her friend.”
Lilly rushes over to the corpse on the ground, kneels, and stares at the shrouded heap, putting her hand to her mouth as though holding in the tide of emotions rising in her. Bruce thumbs the safety down on his semiauto, and awkwardly backs away, standing, gazing down at Lilly as the crowd around them quiets down.
The Governor comes over and stands a respectful five feet away.
Lilly peels back the sheet and clenches her teeth, as she looks at the purplish-gray face of the woman that used to be Megan Lafferty. Eyes swollen shut, jaw set with rigor mortis, the bloodless china-doll face looks as though it has shattered into a million hairline fractures, the dark capillaries apparent now in the early stages of decomposition. The face is ghastly but also excruciatingly poignant to Lilly, wrenching her memories back to those crazy days at Sprayberry High School when the two girls would get high in the restroom and climb up on the school’s roof and throw pebbles at the jocks running drills behind the basketball courts. Megan had been Lilly’s best gal-pal for years, and despite the girl’s faults—and there had been many—Lilly still thinks of her as a best friend. Now Lilly cannot stop staring at this unrecognizable vestige of her feisty friend.
Lilly gasps as Megan’s swollen, purple-lidded eyes suddenly pop open, revealing milk-glass pupils.
Lilly does not move as the black man with the shaved head crowds in, the .45 poised to fire a direct blast into the cadaver’s head. But before the hammer has a chance to fall, the sound of the Governor’s voice calls out: “Hold your fire, Bruce!”
Bruce glances over his shoulder, as the Governor takes a step closer, and then says very softly, “Let her do it.”
Lilly looks up at the man in the long coat, blinks, and says nothing. Her heart feels like ash, her blood running cold in her veins. Way off in the distance the sky rumbles with thunder.
The Governor steps closer. “Go ahead, Bruce. Give her the gun.”
An endless moment passes, and somehow the gun ends up in Lilly’s hand. Beneath her, the thing that was once Megan Lafferty convulses and tenses on the ground, its nervous system dieseling, its mouth peeling away from moldering gray teeth. Lilly can barely see through her tears.
“Put your friend down, Lilly,” the Governor urges softly from behind her.
Lilly raises the gun. Megan’s neck cranes upward toward her like a fetus emerging from its embryonic fluid, teeth clacking hungrily. Lilly puts the muzzle against the monster’s brow.
“Do it, Lilly. Put her out of her misery.”
Lilly closes her eyes. The trigger pad burns her finger like an icicle. When she opens her eyes again the thing on the ground lunges at her, the rancid teeth going for Lilly’s jugular.
It happens so quickly it almost fails to register in Lilly’s brain.
The blast rings out.
Lilly topples backward, falling on her ass, the .45 slipping out of her hand as the top of Megan’s cranium erupts in dark red mist, painting the sidewalk adjacent to the parkway in a spray of brain matter. The reanimated corpse sags and lies still on the tangled shroud—its sharklike eyes fixed on the dark sky.
For a moment Lilly lies supine on the ground, staring at the clouds, gripped in a state of confusion. Who fired the kill shot? Lilly never pulled the trigger. Who did the deed? Lilly blinks away her tears and manages to focus on the Governor standing over her, his grave expression fixed on something to his right.
Bob Stookey stands over the corpse of Megan Lafferty with a .38 police special still clutched in his hand, his shooting arm dangling at his side, a thin wisp of gun smoke still curling out of the barrel.
The desolation on Bob’s weathered, deeply lined face is heartbreaking.
* * *
Those next few days, nobody pays much attention to the changing weather.
Bob is too busy drinking himself to death to notice anything as trivial as weather fronts, and Lilly occupies herself arranging a proper burial for Megan in a plot next to Josh. The Governor spends most of his time preparing for the next big battle in the racetrack arena. He has big plans for the next round of shows, integrating zombies into the gladiatorial matches.
Gabe and Bruce busy themselves with the nasty job of hacking up the dead guardsmen in an auxiliary warehouse beneath the track. The Governor needs body parts to feed the growing menagerie of zombies being housed in a secret room deep in the cinder-block catacombs. Gabe and Bruce enlist some of the younger men from Martinez’s crew to work the chain saws in the festering, cavernous abattoir next to the morgue, rendering human remains into meat.
Meanwhile, the January rains move into the area with slow, insidious menace.
At first, the outer bands of the storm system cause very little alarm—a few scattered showers swelling the storm sewers and icing the streets—with temperatures hovering above freezing. But the distant lightning and roiling black skies on the western horizon begin to worry people. Nobody knows with any degree of certainty—nor will they ever know—why
The National Weather Service out of Peachtree City—still limping along on generators and shortwave radios —issues an early warning that week on as many frequencies as they can spark. But very few listeners benefit from the news. Only a handful of souls hear the frantic voice of the harried meteorologist, Barry Gooden, ranting about the blizzard of ’93 and the floods of 2009.
According to Gooden, the bitter cold front that will smash down upon the American South over the next twenty-four hours will collide with the moist, mild, warm surface temperatures of central Georgia and very likely make these other winter storms seem like passing sprinkles. With seventy-mile-an-hour winds in the forecast, as well as dangerous lightning and a mixture of rain and sleet, the storm promises to play unprecedented havoc with the plague-ridden state. Not only will the volatile swings in temperature threaten to turn the gulley washers into blizzards, but—as the state learned only a couple of years earlier, and now with the advent of the plague— Georgians are woefully unprepared for the ravages of flooding.
A few years back, a major storm pushed the Chattahoochee River over its banks and into the highly populated areas around Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Marietta. Mudslides tore homes from their foundations. Highways lay underwater and the catastrophe resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. But
The first signs of extraordinary weather roar into town that Friday afternoon.
By nightfall the rain is coming down at a forty-five-degree angle on fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, falling in sheets against Woodbury’s barricade, making defunct high-tension wires across the center of town sing and snap like bullwhips. Volleys of lightning turn the dark alleys to silver flickering photographic negatives, and the gutters spill over across Main Street. Most of Woodbury’s inhabitants hunker down inside for the duration … leaving the sidewalks and boarded storefronts deserted …
… mostly deserted, that is, except for a group of four residents, who brave the rains in order to gather surreptitiously in an office beneath the racetrack.
* * *
“Leave the light off, Alice, if you don’t mind,” a voice says from the shadows behind a desk. The dull glimmer of wire-framed spectacles floating in the darkness is the only thing that identifies Dr. Stevens. The muffled
