The Walking Dead Collection (31 page)

EIGHTEEN

“What the hell?” Brian snaps awake in the darkness of his room. He fumbles for one of the kerosene lanterns on his bedside table, knocking over the hurricane glass and spilling fluid. He gets up and goes to the window, the floor icy on the soles of his bare feet.

Moonlight shines down from a crystalline cold autumn night sky, lining every shape outside with a luminous halo of silver. Brian can still hear the tin cans on the trip wires rattling out there somewhere. He can also hear the others stirring in their bedrooms behind him, down the hall. Everybody is up now, awakened by the jangling cans.

The strangest part is—and Brian wonders if he’s imagining this—the rattling sounds are coming from all directions. Tin cans are clattering in the groves
behind
the villa as well as in front of it. Brian is craning his neck to see better when his bedroom door bursts open.

“Sport! You up?” Philip is shirtless, wearing jeans and logger boots that he hasn’t had a chance to tie yet. He holds the old shotgun with one hand, his eyes wide open with alarm. “I’m gonna need you to go get that pitchfork in the back hallway—pronto!”

“Is it Biters?”

“Just get moving!”

Brian gives a nod and hurries out of the room, his brain swimming with panic. He wears only his sweatpants and a sleeveless T-shirt. As he pads through the darkness of the house—down the stairs, across the parlor, and into the back hall—he senses movement outside the windows, the presence of others closing in on them from outside.

Grabbing the pitchfork, which leans against the back door, Brian whirls and heads back to the front room.

By this point, Philip, Nick, and even Penny have reached the bottom of the steps. They go to the front bay window, which offers a wide-angle view of the surrounding yards, the sloping drive down to the adjacent road, and even the edge of the closest orchard. Immediately they see dark shapes—low to the ground—sliding across the property from three different directions.

“Are those cars?” Nick utters in barely a whisper.

As their eyes adjust to the moonlit night, they each realize that yes, indeed, those
are
cars moving slowly across the property toward the villa. One comes up the winding drive, another one from the north end of the orchard, a third just visible to the south, crunching slowly over the gravel path leading out of the trees.

Almost with perfect synchronous timing, each vehicle suddenly stops at an equidistant point from the house. They sit there for a second, each one maybe fifty feet away, their windows too dark to reveal their occupants. “This ain’t no welcome wagon,” Philip murmurs, the understatement of the evening.

Again, almost in perfect concurrence, each pair of headlights suddenly snaps on. The effect is fairly dramatic—almost theatrical, in fact—as the beams strike the windows of the villa, filling the dark interior with cold chromium light. Philip is about to go outside and make a stand with the defunct shotgun when the sound of a crash is heard, coming from the rear of the villa.

“Punkin, you stay with Brian,” Philip says to Penny. Then he shoots a glance at Nick. “Nicky, I want you to see if you can slip out a side window, take the machete, double back on ’em if you can. You follow me?”

Nick understands exactly what he’s saying, and he takes off down the side hallway.

“Stay behind me, but stay close.” Philip raises the shotgun, the butt against his shoulder. Carefully and focused with cobralike calm, Philip shuffles commando-style toward the sound of footsteps on broken glass now coming from the kitchen.

*   *   *

“Nice and easy does it, hoss,” the home invader says in a cheerful Tennessee twang, raising the barrel of a nine-millimeter Glock as Philip enters the kitchen with the shotgun also raised.

Before being so rudely interrupted, the intruder had been calmly looking around the kitchen as though he had just climbed out of bed for a midnight snack. Headlamps, coming from outside, pierce the room with harsh radiance. The pane of glass above the doorknob behind the man is busted in, and the faint light of dawn is just beginning to glow.

Well over six feet tall, dressed in shopworn camo-pants, muddy jackboots, and a blood-soaked Kevlar flak vest, the home invader is completely bald, with a scarred, missile-shaped head and eyes like craters cut by tiny meteors. On closer scrutiny, he looks sick, like he’s been exposed to radiation, his jaundiced skin mottled with sores.

Philip points the worthless antique shotgun at the bald man’s cranium—about eight feet between the two men—and Philip concentrates on pretending—maybe even believing—that the shotgun is loaded. “I’ll give y’all the benefit of the doubt,” Philip says. “I’ll assume you thought the place was empty.”

“That’s exactly right, hoss,” the bald man says, his voice calm, maybe medicated, like that of a dreamy disc jockey. His teeth are capped in gold, and they shimmer dully as he smiles a reptilian smile.

“So, we’ll thank y’all to just leave us be—no harm, no foul.”

The man with the Glock apes a hurt frown. “Now, that ain’t too neighborly of you.” The man has a slight tremor, a tic, percolating with latent violence. “I see y’all got a cute little thang back there.”

“Never mind that.” Philip stands his ground. He can hear the front door squeak, footsteps crossing the parlor. His brain crashes with panic and warring impulses. He knows the next few seconds are critical, maybe even mortally so. But all he can think of doing is to stall. “We don’t want any bloodshed, and brother, I guarantee you, no matter what happens, yours and mine’s gonna be the first blood that’s shed.”

“Smooth talker.” The bald man calls out suddenly to one of his comrades in the dark. “Shorty?”

A voice answers from outside the back door. “Got him, Tommy!”

Almost on cue, Nick appears outside the jagged window of the back door, a large Bowie knife held against his windpipe. His captor, a skinny kid with pimples and a marine jarhead haircut, pushes open the door and shoves Nick into the kitchen.

“I’m sorry, Philly,” Nick says as he is shoved against the cabinets—hard enough to steal his breath. The slender young man with the crew cut holds the knife against Nick’s Adam’s apple, a machete thrust down the young man’s belt. A jittery, bony specimen with fingerless Carnaby gloves on his hands, the skinny kid looks like an escapee from a marine brig. His fatigue jacket has the sleeves torn off, and his long bare arms are riddled with jailhouse hieroglyph.

“Hold on, now,” Philip says to the bald man. “There’s no reason to—”

“Sonny!” The bald man calls out to another accomplice at the precise same moment Philip hears the footsteps creaking across the hundred-year-old hardwood floor out in the front parlor. Philip keeps the shotgun raised and aimed, but shoots a quick side glance back over his shoulder. Brian and Penny huddle in the shadows directly behind Philip, maybe five feet off his heels.

Two more figures have suddenly appeared behind Brian and Penny, making the little girl jump.

“Got it covered, Tommy!” says one of the figures as the steel-plated barrel of a large-caliber revolver—maybe a .357 Magnum, maybe an Army .45—becomes visible for all to see, pressing against the back of Brian Blake’s skull. Brian stiffens like a cornered animal.

“Hold on now,” Philip says.

In his peripheral vision, he can see that the two figures holding guns on Brian and Penny are a man and a woman … although he would use the word
woman
loosely in this case. The gal clutching a piece of Penny’s collar is an androgynous marionette of skin and bones, clad in leather pants and layers of mesh, with lampblack eyeliner, spikey hair, and the slightly greenish pallor of a junkie. She nervously taps the barrel of a .38 police special against the shank of her beanpole thigh.

The man next to her—the one apparently named Sonny—also looks as though he’s no stranger to the needle. His sunken eyes stare out from a pockmarked mask of ignorance and meanness, his emaciated form clad in army-surplus rags.

“I want to thank you, brother,” the bald man says, shoving his nine-millimeter back into its belt sheath, acting like the showdown has now officially ended. “You dug up quite a spot here. I’ll give you that.” He goes over to the sink and calmly helps himself to the jug of well water sitting on the counter, quaffing down an entire glassful. “This’ll do nicely as a home base.”

“That’s all well and good,” Philip says, not making any move to lower his faux weapon. “Only problem is, we can’t take on any more people.”

“That’s okay, brother.”

“Then what exactly are you planning to…? What are your intentions?”

“Our
intentions
?” The bald man enunciates the word with mock profundity. “Our intentions are to take this place from y’all.”

Somebody that Philip can’t see snickers with great amusement.

Philip’s brain is a fractured chessboard, pieces moving now in herky-jerky motion. He knows that it’s likely that these hardened road rats mean to kill him and everybody else in the house. He knows they’re parasites, and they’ve most likely been circling the place like buzzards for weeks—Brian wasn’t hearing things, it turns out.

Even now, Philip can hear others outside—low voices, twigs snapping—and he does the quick mental arithmetic: There are at least six of them, maybe more, and at least four vehicles, and each one seems to be heavily armed, with plenty of ammo—Philip can see mags and speed-loaders clipped to some of the belts—but the one thing they seem to lack that maybe, just maybe, Philip can work with, is the appearance of intelligence. Even the big bald guy—who seems to be the honcho—has the look of a dull stoner in his eyes. There won’t be any appeals to mercy, no appeals to the better angels here. Philip has only one chance at survival.

“You mind if I say something?” he asks. “Before y’all do anything rash.”

The bald man raises his glass as though giving a toast. “You got the floor, friend.”

“We got two ways this can go down, is all I’m trying to say.”

This seems to pique the bald man’s curiosity. He sets down his glass and turns to Philip. “Only two ways?”

“One way is, we start blazing and I can tell you how that’s gonna play out.”

“Do tell.”

“Your folks will overpower us and that’ll be that, but the only thing is, I promise you one thing and—I’ll be honest with you—I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“And what’s that?”

“No matter what, I know that I’ll be able to get off a single shot, and I say this with no disrespect, but I will make damn sure that the overwhelmin’ majority of these steel beads go into the top half of your body. Now, sir, do you want to hear option two?”

The bald man has lost his sense of humor. “Keep talkin’.”

“Option two is you let us walk outta here alive, and you take our place with our compliments, and nobody has to clean up no messes and you get to keep the top half of your body.”

*   *   *

For quite a while, things proceed in a very orderly fashion (on the bald man’s orders). The junkie couple—in his stricken brain, Philip is coming to think of them as Sonny and Cher—simply back away slowly from Brian and Penny, allowing Brian to lift the child off the floor and carry her across the front parlor to the door.

The agreement—if you can call it that—is for Philip and his group to simply walk away from the villa, leaving all their things, and that’s that. Brian watches Philip backing out of the house with the shotgun still raised.
Thank God for that piece of shit antique
. Nick follows. The two of them join Brian and Penny in the doorway, and Brian nudges the door open with Penny in his arms.

They shuffle outside, the shotgun still aimed at the intruders inside.

A number of things flood Brian’s senses—the cool wind, the pale light of dawn rising behind the orchards, the silhouettes of two additional gunmen on either flank of the house, the cars angled with their high beams still on like theatrical spotlights heralding the next act of a nightmarish play.

The bald man’s voice calls out from inside: “Boys! Let ’em pass!”

The two accomplices outside, dressed in ragged military fatigues and wielding heavy artillery—each man cradles a sawed-off pistol-grip shotgun—watch with the baleful interest of predatory birds as Brian carefully transfers Penny onto his shoulders, piggyback style. Philip whispers low, “Stay close, and follow me. They still mean to kill us. Just do what I say.”

Brian follows Philip—who is still bare-chested and still has that ridiculous gun raised commando-style—across the yard, past one of the watchful gunmen, and toward the neighboring grove of peach trees.

*   *   *

It takes an excruciating amount of time for Philip to get everybody across the property and into the shadows of the closest orchard—mere seconds by the clock, but an eternity for Brian Blake—because now the methodical transfer of ownership has begun to fall apart.

Brian can hear troubling things behind him as he hurriedly carries Penny toward the tree line. Brian is still barefoot, and the soles of his feet sting from the brambles and stones. Voices raised in anger drift out of the villa, footsteps, movement across the front porch.

The first shot rings out just as Philip and his group are plunging into the trees. The blast shatters the air, and chews through a branch six inches from Brian’s right shoulder, spitting bark at the side of his face and making Penny yelp. Philip shoves Brian—still with Penny on his back—forward into the deeper shadows. “RUN!” he orders them. “RUN, BRIAN! NOW!”

*   *   *

For Brian Blake, the next five minutes pass with the chaotic blur of a dream. He hears more gunfire behind him, bullets sizzling through the foliage as he hurtles through the woods, the watery light of dawn not yet driving away the deeper shadows of the orchards. Brian’s bare feet—getting more and more chewed up by the second—dig into the soft undercarpet of leaves and fruit slime, his brain sparking with roman candles of panic. Penny bounces along on his back, hyperventilating with terror. Brian has no idea how far to go, where to go, or when he can stop. He just keeps churning deeper into the shadows of the orchard.