The Walking Dead Collection (25 page)

April looks up into his eyes. “Whaddaya mean?”

He turns toward her. “Met a lotta girls in my day, ain’t never run across one quite like you. Tough as nails … but the tenderness you show toward my kid? Never seen Penny take to somebody like she’s taken to you. Hell, you saved our asses, pulling us off the streets. You’re a very special lady, you know that?”

All at once April feels her skin flush hot with chills, and her midsection weaken, and she realizes Philip is looking at her in a new way. His eyes shimmer with emotion. She knows now that he’s been thinking the same thing that she has. She looks down, embarrassed. “Your standards must be low,” she mutters.

He reaches out and gently puts one of his big, callused workman’s hands on the curve of her jaw. “I got the highest standards of anybody I know.”

A clap of thunder booms outside the glass, rattling the bridge and making April jump.

Philip kisses her on the lips.

She pulls back. “I don’t know, Philip … I mean … I don’t know if this is … you know.”

Second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts flow through April in the space of an instant. If she takes this to the next level, what will happen with Tara? How will it fuck up the dynamics at the apartment? How will it complicate things? How will it affect their safety, their chances of survival, their future (if they even have one)?

Philip’s expression brings her back—the way he’s looking at her, his gaze almost glassy with emotion, his mouth slack with desire.

He leans in and kisses her again, and this time she finds herself putting her arms around him and returning the kiss, and she doesn’t even notice the droplets of rain beginning to ping off the glass over her head.

She feels her body go limp in Philip’s forceful embrace. Their lips part, and electricity flows through April as they explore each other with their tongues, the taste of coffee and spearmint gum and Philip’s musky odor filling her senses. Her nipples harden under her sweater.

A flash of blue lightning turns the dusk to brilliant silver daylight.

April loses track of herself. She loses track of
everything.
Her head is spinning. She doesn’t notice the rain slapping against the glass roof. She doesn’t even notice the fact that Philip is gently lowering both of them to the floor of the walkway. Their lips locked and working sensually, Philip’s big hands caressing April’s breasts, he carefully lays her back against the glass wall, and before April knows what is happening, he is on top of her.

The storm unleashes its fury. The rain comes down now in sheets against the roof. Thunder rolls and lightning crackles and sparks like static electricity in the anxious air as Philip fumbles April’s sweater up across her bare midriff, exposing her bra in the blue light.

Gnarled fingers wrestle open belt buckles. Thunder booms. April feels the urgent nudge of Philip’s loins burrowing between her legs. Lightning flickers. Her jeans are halfway down her legs, her breasts free now.

The edge of a fingernail brushes her belly, and all at once, like a switch flipping inside her—accompanied by a single volley of thunder—she thinks,
WAIT
.

BOOOOOOOM!

WAIT!

*   *   *

A tidal wave of desire carries Philip Blake off on its roaring currents.

He can barely hear April’s voice coming from somewhere far away, telling him to
Stop, wait, hold on, listen, listen, this is too much, I’m not ready for this, please, please, stop right now, stop
. None of it registers in Philip’s brain as it swims with lust and passion and pain and loneliness and a desperate need to
feel something,
because now his entire being is wired to his groin, all his pent-up emotion coursing through him.

“God, I’m begging you to stop!” the faraway voice pleads, April’s body stiffening.

Philip rides the writhing woman beneath him as if surfing a pipeline of white noise, knowing that she secretly wants him,
loves him,
despite what she’s saying. So, he keeps shoving himself into her, again and again, in great magnesium-bright flashes of lightning and raw energy, filling her, taking her, nourishing her, transforming her, until she goes limp beneath him, limp and silent now.

The soft white explosion of pleasure erupts like a skyrocket launching inside Philip.

He slides off her, landing on the floor next to her, staring straight up at the rain—momentarily oblivious to the shadowy, desecrated souls thirty feet below them, captured in the flicker-show of lightning like monstrous figures in a silent movie.

*   *   *

Philip takes April’s silence as a sign that maybe, just maybe, everything’s going to be okay. As the storm settles into a steady deluge, its muffled jet-engine roar filling the walkway, the two of them pull their clothes back on and lie there side by side for a long time, not saying a word, staring up at the strafing sheets of rain crashing off the glass roof.

Philip is in a state of shock, his heart racing, his skin clammy and cold. He feels like a broken mirror, as if a shard of his own soul has fractured off and reflected back the face of a monster. What did he just do? He knows he did something wrong. But it almost feels like somebody else did it.

“Got a little carried away there,” he says at last, after many minutes of terrible silence.

She doesn’t say a word. He glances over at her, and sees her face in the darkness, reflecting the liquid shadows of rain streaming down the sides of the glass walkway. She looks semiconscious. Like she’s having a waking dream.

“Sorry about that,” he says, the words sounding tinny and hollow in his own ears. He shoots another glance at her, trying to gauge her mood. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

Her voice has a mechanical quality to it, completely colorless, barely audible above the noise of the rain. Philip is about to say something else when a volley of thunder interrupts his thought. The rumbling reverberates through the iron framework of the walkway, a teeth-rattling vibration that makes Philip cringe.

“April?”

“Yes.”

“We ought to get back.”

*   *   *

The return trip is shrouded in silence. Philip walks a few paces behind April through the deserted lobby, up a staircase, and down the empty, litter-strewn corridors. Every now and then, Philip considers saying something, but he doesn’t. He figures it’s probably best to let it ride right now. Let her work through it. Anything Philip says might make it worse. April walks ahead of him with the shotgun on her shoulder, looking like a tired soldier returning from a rough patrol. They reach the top floor of the accounting firm and find the gaping window, the rain blowing in past jagged, broken glass. Only a few words are spoken—“You go first” and “Watch your step”—as Philip helps her climb out and cross the rain-swept fire escape. The pounding wind and rain that lashes down on them as they shimmy across the treacherous makeshift catwalk almost feels good to Philip. It braces him and wakes him up and gives him hope that maybe he can repair whatever damage has been done here tonight with this woman.

By the time they get back to the apartment—both of them soaked to the bone, exhausted, and dazed—Philip is confident he can fix this.

Brian is in the office bedroom with Penny, putting her to sleep on her cot. Nick is in the living room, working on his map of safe zones. “Hey, how’d it go?” he asks, looking up from his papers. “You guys look like drowned rats; you find any Home Depots out there?”

“Not this time,” Philip replies, heading for the bedroom, not even pausing to take off his shoes.

April says nothing, doesn’t even meet Nick’s gaze as she heads toward the hallway.

“Look at you two,” Tara says, coming out of the kitchen with a surly expression and a lit cigarette dangling out of the corner of her mouth. “Just like I thought—a wild fucking goose chase!”

She stands there with her hands on her hips as her sister vanishes without a word into her room at the end of the hall. Tara gives Philip a look, and then storms away, following her sister.

“I’m going to bed,” Philip says flatly to Nick and then adjourns to his room.

*   *   *

The next morning, Philip stirs awake just before dawn. The rain still pounds the streets outside. He can hear it drumming off the window. The room is dark and cold and dank, and smells of mold. He sits on the edge of the bed for the longest time, looking at Penny, who slumbers across the room on her cot, her tiny body all balled up in a fetal position. The half-formed memories of a dream cling to Philip’s woozy brain, as well as the sickening sensation that he doesn’t know where the nightmares end and the episode with April the previous evening begins.

If only he had
dreamed
those events in the pedestrian walkway instead of actually acting them out. But the hard, sharp edge of reality comes back to him in that dark room in a series of flash frames in his mind, as though he’s watching someone else perpetrate the crime. Philip hangs his head, trying to push the feelings of dread and guilt from his mind.

Running fingers through his hair, he talks himself into being hopeful. He can work through this with April, figure out a way to move forward, put it behind them, apologize to her, make it up to her.

He watches Penny sleep.

In the two and a half weeks since Philip’s little cadre joined up with the Chalmers, Philip has noticed his daughter coming out of her shell. At first, he detected little things: the way Penny had begun to look forward to concocting their god-awful dinners, and the way she lit up every time April walked into a room. With each passing day, though, the child has become more and more talkative, remembering things from before the “turn,” commenting on the strange weather patterns, asking questions about the “sickness.” Can animals get the disease? Does it wear off? Is God mad at them?

Philip’s chest hitches with emotion as he gazes at the slumbering child. There has to be a way to make a life for his daughter, make a family, make a home—even in the midst of this waking nightmare—there has to be a way.

For a brief instant, Philip imagines a desert island and a little cottage nestled in a grove of coconut trees. The plague is a million light-years away. He imagines April and Penny on a swing set, playing together out by a vegetable garden. He imagines himself sitting on a back porch, healthy, brown from the sun, happily watching the two ladies in his life sharing contented moments. He imagines all this while he watches his daughter sleep.

He gets up and pads over to her, kneeling and lightly putting a hand on the downy softness of her hair. She needs to bathe. Her hair is matted and greasy, and she has a faint body odor. That smell somehow reaches out to Philip and pinches his gut. His eyes well up. He has never loved anyone other than this child. Even Sarah—whom he adored—came in second. His love for Sarah was—like that of all married people—complicated, conditional, and fluid. But when he first laid eyes on his baby girl as a blotchy little newborn, seven and half years ago, he learned what it means to love.

It means to be afraid, to be vulnerable for the rest of your life.

Something catches Philip’s attention across the room. The door is half ajar. He remembers shutting it before turning in. He remembers that very clearly. Now it’s cracked open about six inches.

At first, this doesn’t really make much of an impression or worry him all that much. Maybe he accidentally neglected to latch the door, and the thing drifted open on its own. Or maybe he got up to piss in the middle of the night and forgot to close it. Or maybe
Penny
had to pee and left it open. Hell, maybe he’s a sleepwalker and doesn’t even know it. But then, just as he’s turning back to continue gazing down at his daughter, he notices something else.

Things are missing from the room.

Philip’s heart starts thumping. He left his backpack—the one he was wearing when he arrived here over two weeks ago—leaning against the wall in the corner, but now it’s gone. His gun is missing as well. He left the .22 pistol on top of the dresser with the last magazine of bullets beside it. The ammo is gone, too.

Philip springs to his feet.

He looks around. The gloomy dawn is just beginning to lighten the room, the window shade projecting tears of rain, the ghostly reflections of water sluicing down the glass outside it. His boots are not where he left them. He left them on the floor by the window, but now they’re gone. Who the hell would take his boots? He tells himself to calm down. There has to be a simple explanation. No reason to get all jacked up. But the absence of the gun is what troubles him the most. He decides to take this one step at a time.

Silently, careful not to awaken Penny, he crosses the room and slips out the open door.

The apartment is silent and still. Brian dozes in the living room on the pull-out bed. Philip pads into the kitchen, lights up the propane stove, and makes himself a cup of instant coffee with some rainwater left in a bucket. He splashes some of the cold water on his face. He tells himself to stay calm, take some deep breaths.

When the coffee is hot, he takes the cup and walks down the hallway to April’s room.

Her door is also ajar.

He looks in and sees that the room is empty. His pulse quickens.

A voice says, “She ain’t here.”

He whirls and comes face-to-face with Tara Chalmers, who holds the Ruger pistol, the muzzle raised and aimed directly at Philip.

FIFTEEN

“All right … go easy, sis.” Philip makes no move. He just stands there, frozen in the hallway, with his free hand raised, and the coffee in his other hand, jutting out to the side like he’s interested in offering it to her. “Whatever it is, we can work it out.”

“Really…?”
Tara Chalmers glowers at him with her painted eyes flaring. “Ya think?”

“Look … I don’t know what’s going on—”

“What’s going on,” she says without a trace of nerves or fear, “is that we’re changing the lineup around here.”

“Tara, whatever you’re thinking—”