drumming of the storm punctuates the silence.
Alice nods and stands near the light switch, nervously rubbing her cold hands against each other. Her lab coat looks ghostly in the gloomy, windowless office that Stevens has been using for a storage room.
“You called this meeting, Lilly,” murmurs Martinez from the opposite corner of the room, where he sits on a stool, smoking a cheroot—the slender cigar’s glowing tip like a firefly in the darkness. “What are you thinking?”
Lilly paces in the shadows near a row of metal filing cabinets. She wears one of Josh’s army surplus raincoats, which is so big on her she looks like a child playing dress-up. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking I’m not going to live like this anymore.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this place is rotten to the core, it’s sick, and this Governor dude is the sickest one of all, and I don’t see things getting any better in the foreseeable future.”
“And…?”
She shrugs. “I’m looking at my options.”
“Which are?”
She paces some more, choosing her words carefully. “Packing up and taking off by myself seems suicidal … but I’d be willing to take my chances out there if it was the only way to get away from this shit.”
Martinez looks at Stevens, who is across the room, wiping his eyeglasses with a cloth and listening intently. The two men share an uneasy glance. Finally Stevens speaks up: “You mentioned options.”
Lilly stops pacing. She looks at Martinez. “These guys you work with on the fence … you trust them?”
Martinez takes a drag off the cheroot, and smoke forms a wreath around his face. “More or less.”
“Some more and some less?”
He shrugs. “You could say that, yeah.”
“But these guys you trust more than the others, would they back you up in a pinch?”
Martinez stares at her. “What are we talking about here, Lilly?”
Lilly takes a deep breath. She has no idea if she can trust these people, but they also seem like the only sane individuals in Woodbury. She decides to play her hand. After a long pause, she says very softly, “I’m talking about regime change.”
Another series of apprehensive glances pass between Martinez, Stevens, and Alice. The edgy silence throbs with the muffled noise of the storm. The winds have kicked up even higher, and thunder rattles the foundation with increasing frequency.
At last the doctor says, “Lilly, I don’t think you know what you’re—”
“No!” she interrupts him, looking at the floor, speaking in a cold, flat monotone. “No more history lessons, Doc. We’re past that now. Past playing it safe. This dude Philip Blake has to go … and you know it as well as I do.”
Over their heads a volley of thunder reverberates. Stevens lets out an anguished sigh. “You’re going to buy yourself a gig in the gladiator ring, you keep talking like that.”
Unfazed, Lilly looks up at Martinez. “I don’t know you very well, Martinez, but you seem like a fairly even- tempered kind of guy … kind of guy who could lead a revolt, get things back on track.”
Martinez stares at her. “Slow down, kiddo … you’re gonna hurt yourself.”
“Whatever … you don’t have to listen to me … I don’t care anymore.” She makes eye contact with each of them, one at a time. “But you all know I’m right. Things are going to get a lot worse around here, we don’t do something about this. You want to turn me in for treason, fine, go ahead. Whatever. But we may never get another chance to take this freak down. And I for one am not going to sit on my hands and do nothing while this place goes down in flames and more and more innocent people die. You know I’m right about this.” She looks back down at the floor. “The Governor has to go.”
Another barrage of thunder rattles the ribs of the building, as the silence in the storage room stretches. Finally Alice speaks up.
“She’s right, you know.”
SIXTEEN
The next day, the storm—now a constant bombardment of driving rain and freezing sleet—lashes southeastern Georgia with massive force. Telephone poles buckle under the weight of the onslaught, crashing down on highways choked with abandoned cars. Culverts swell and gush, flooding deserted farms, while the higher elevations are coated with treacherous layers of ice. Eleven miles southeast of Woodbury, in a wooded hollow adjacent to Highway 36, the storm hits the largest public cemetery in the southern United States.
The Edward Nightingale Memorial Gardens and Columbarium lines a mile-long bluff just south of Sprewell State Park, and features tens of thousands of historic markers. The Gothic chapel and visitor center stand at the eastern end of the property, within a stone’s throw of the Woodland Medical Center—one of the state’s largest hospitals. Filled with freshly-turned zombies, abandoned by the staff since the early weeks of the plague, the complex of buildings—including the morgue at Woodland, as well as the enormous labyrinth of funeral parlors underneath the sublevels of Nightingale—teems with reanimated dead, some of them fresh corpses marked for autopsies and burials, others recent DOAs tucked into drawers, all of them trapped, up to this point, in their sealed chambers.
At 4:37 P.M. Eastern Standard Time that Saturday, the nearby Flint River reaches flood levels. In photo- strobe flashes of lightning, the violent currents crash over the banks, razing farms, toppling billboards, and tossing abandoned vehicles across the farm roads like toys scattered by an angry child.
The mudslides start within an hour. The entire northern slope along the borders of the cemetery gives way, sliding toward the Flint on a slimy, brown, mealy wave—ripping graves from the ground, flinging antique caskets across the hill. Coffins break open and spill their ghastly contents into the ocean of mud and sleet and wind. Most of the ragged skeletons break apart like kindling. But many of the non-interred corpses—especially the ones who are still fresh and intact and able to crawl or scrabble—begin slithering toward high, dry land.
Ornate windows along the base of the Nightingale visitor center crack under the pressure of the floodtide, imploding, the gale-force winds doing the rest of the work, tearing sections off Gothic spires and shaving the tops of steeples and decapitating gabled rooftops. A quarter mile to the east, the rushing floodwaters hit the medical center hard, driving debris through weakened entryways and windows.
The zombies trapped inside the morgue pour out of jagged openings, many of them sucked into the currents by the violent wind and air pressure.
By five o’clock that day, a multitude of dead large enough to fill a necropolis—like a vast school of sea creatures washed onto a beach—gets deposited across the neighboring orchards and tobacco fields. They tumble, one over another, on the flood currents, some of them getting caught in trees, others tangling in floating farm implements. Some drift for miles underwater, flailing in the flickering dark with involuntary instinct and inchoate hunger. Thousands of them collect in the moraines and valleys and sheltered areas north of the highway, struggling to climb out of the mud in grotesque pantomimes of primordial man emerging from the Paleolithic soup.
Before the torrential rainstorm has passed—the brunt of it moving on toward the Eastern Seaboard that night—the population of dead now littering the countryside outnumbers the population of living residents, preplague, in the nearby city of Harrington, Georgia—which, according to the sign on Highway 36, totals 4,011 souls.
In the aftermath of this epochal storm, almost a thousand of these wayward corpses begin to coalesce into the largest herd yet witnessed since the advent of the plague. In the rain-swept darkness, the zombies slowly, awkwardly cluster and horde, until a massive throng has formed in the rolling fields between Crest Highway and Roland Road. The herd is so densely packed that from a distance the tops of their putrid heads might be mistaken for a dark, brackish, slow-moving flood tide unfurling across the land.
For no particular reason other than the inexplicable behavior of the dead—be it instinct, scent, pheromones, or random chance—the horde starts churning through the mud in a northwesterly direction, directly toward the closest population center in their path—the town called Woodbury—which lies a little over eight miles away.
* * *
The tail end of the storm leaves the farms and fields of southeastern Georgia inundated with vast, black pools of filthy standing water, the shallow sections turning to black ice, the higher areas seizing up in mud.
