The Walking Dead Collection (36 page)

All of which suits Philip, Brian, and Nick just fine. After scouting the edges of town, they decide to hole up in an abandoned two-unit apartment building on the southern border of the safe zone, near the uninhabited commercial district. Somebody has moved school buses and empty semitrailers into rows around the periphery of town, forming a makeshift bastion to keep out the Biters.

For now, the place seems relatively safe.

*   *   *

That night, Brian can’t sleep, so he decides to sneak out and explore the town. Walking isn’t easy—his ribs are still bothering him, and his breathing is labored and wheezy—but it feels good to get out and clear his head.

In the diamond-chip moonlight, the sidewalks lie desolate and barren, threading through what was once a typical little blue-collar burg. Trash blows willy-nilly across deserted playgrounds and squares. Storefronts housing the requisite small-town merchants—the local dentist, DeForest’s Feed and Seed, a Dairy Queen, the Piggly Wiggly—are all dark and boarded. Evidence of the “turn” lies everywhere—in the lime pits at Kirney’s Salvage Yard, where bodies have been recently deposited and torched, and in the community gazebo at Robert E. Lee Square, where bloodstains from some gruesome battle still glisten like black tar in the moonlight.

Brian isn’t surprised to learn that the open field in the center of town—which he first glimpsed from the neighboring farm field—is an old dirt racetrack. Apparently, the residents have enough fuel to keep generators going around the clock; and as Brian soon discovers, every so often, in the dark of night, the huge arc lights over the racetrack flare on for no good reason. On the far side of the track, Brian passes a semitrailer pulsing like a great steel heart with the muffled vibrations of combustion engines—the cables snaking out the back and tying into neighboring buildings.

By the time dawn starts to glow on the eastern horizon, Brian decides he better head back to the two-flat. He crosses a deserted parking lot, and then takes a shortcut down a litter-strewn alley. He reaches the adjacent street and passes a group of old men huddled around a flaming trash barrel, warming their hands against the chill and passing around a bottle of Thunderbird.

“Watch your back, sonny,” one of the men says to Brian as he passes, and the two other men chuckle humorlessly. The three men are ancient, grizzled, spavined codgers in moth-eaten Salvation Army coats. They look like they’ve been hunkered around this barrel for eternity.

Brian pauses. He has the snub-nosed .38 pistol wedged behind his belt, under his jacket, but he feels no compulsion to brandish it. “Got Biters in the area?”

“Biters?” one of the other men says. This one has a long white beard and his wrinkled eyes narrow with confusion.

“He means them dead things,” says the third old derelict, the fattest of the three.

“Yeah, Charlie,” says the first old man. “You remember … them walkin’ pus bags that ate Yellow Mike … the reason we’re stuck in this shitheel town?”

“I know what he’s talkin’ about!” snaps the bearded codger. “Just never heard ’em called such a thing before.”

“You new in town, son?” The fat one is giving Brian the once-over.

“As a matter of fact, yeah … I am.”

The fat old man shows a grin full of rotten, green teeth. “Welcome to hell’s waiting room.”

“Don’t listen to him, son,” the first old man says, putting a bony, arthritic arm around Brian’s shoulder. Then, in a low, mucousy voice, the old guy says confidentially: “It ain’t the dead things you gotta be mindful of around here … it’s the living.”

*   *   *

The next day, Philip tells Brian and Nick to keep their mouths shut while they’re in Woodbury, stay under the radar, avoid any contact with other residents, refrain from even telling people their names. Thankfully, the apartment serves them well as a temporary refuge. Built in the 1950s, with furnishings at least that old—chipped mirror tile on one wall, a moth-eaten sleeper sofa in the living room, a huge rectangular fish tank next to the TV, brimming with scum and the tiny floating corpses of neglected goldfish—the place has three bedrooms and running water. It smells like rancid cat shit and rotting fish, but as Brian’s dad used to say, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” They find canned goods in the pantries of both apartments, and they decide to stay for a while.

Much to Brian’s amazement, the townspeople leave them alone, as though they are ghosts. Brian can tell that word has spread among the inhabitants of newcomers in their midst, but still, it’s as though the Blakes and Nick are apparitions haunting the broken-down apartment. Which is not too far from the truth. Nick keeps to himself and reads his Bible and doesn’t say much. Philip and Brian, still edgy around each other, also go about their business with minimal conversation. It doesn’t even occur to them to find a vehicle and continue on their southward journey. It feels to Brian like they’ve given up … on getting to the coast, on the future, maybe on each other.

Brian continues to heal, and Philip tends to his own obsession with Penny, stealing away to the hickory grove every chance he gets.

*   *   *

Late one night, Brian hears the apartment door clicking open and shut.

He lies there in bed, listening for nearly an hour, when finally he hears Philip returning in a flurry of shuffling steps and gurgling noises. This is the third night in a row Philip has silently slipped out of the apartment—presumably to check on Penny while the townspeople are asleep—but up until tonight, his return has been as quiet and discreet as his departure. But now Brian can hear Philip breathing heavily out in the living room, murmuring something that is drowned out by watery groaning sounds and the clank of a chain.

Brian climbs out of bed and goes into the living room. He freezes when he sees Philip dragging Penny on her leash, yanking her across the floor like a whipped dog.

For a brief instant, Brian is speechless. All he can do is stare at the little moving corpse in her pigtails and muddy pinafore dress, her feet tracking filth across the apartment floor, and hope that she’s a temporary visitor and not—God forbid—a new roommate.

TWENTY-ONE

“What the hell are you doing?” Brian asks his brother as the dead girl claws at the air with stupid hunger. She fixes her milky eyes on Brian.

“It’ll be okay,” Philip says, yanking his dead daughter toward the back hall.

“You’re not—”

“Mind your own goddamn business.”

“But what if somebody—”

“Nobody saw me,” he says, kicking open the door to the laundry room.

It’s a small, claustrophic chamber of linoleum tile and corkboard walls with a broken-down washer and dryer, and ancient cat litter ground into the seams of the floor. Philip drags the drooling, snarling thing into the corner and attaches her leash to the exposed water pipes. He does this with the firm yet gentle hand of an animal trainer.

Brian watches from the hall, appalled at what he’s seeing. Philip has blankets spread out on the floor and duct-taped to the sharp edges of the washing machine to prevent the Penny-thing from making noise or hurting herself. It’s obvious he’s been preparing for this for a while now. He’s been thinking about it a lot. He rigs a makeshift leather halter—fashioned from a belt and pieces of the leash—around her head, attaching it to the pipes.

Philip goes about his business with the gentle rigor of a caretaker securing a wheelchair for a handicapped child. With the steel separator, he holds the tiny monster at arm’s length and carefully secures the restraints to the wall. All through this, the thing that was once a child snarls and slavers and yanks at her restraints.

Brian stares. He can’t decide whether to turn away, cry, or scream. He gets the feeling that he’s stumbled upon something disturbingly intimate here, and for a brief instant, his racing thoughts cast back to the time he was eighteen years old and visiting the nursing home in Waynesboro to say good-bye to his dying grandmother. He’ll never forget the look on her caretaker’s face. On an almost hourly basis, that male nurse had to clean the shit from the old lady’s backside, and the expression on his face while he did so, with relatives in the room, was horrible: a mixture of disgust, stoic professionalism, pity, and contempt.

That same weird expression is now contorting Philip Blake’s features as he buckles straps around the monster’s little head, carefully avoiding the danger zone around her snapping jaws. He sings softly to her as he works on her shackles—some sort of off-key lullaby that Brian can’t identify.

Eventually, Philip is satisfied with the restraints. He tenderly strokes the top of the Penny-thing’s head, and then kisses her forehead. The girl’s jaws snap at him, missing his jugular by centimeters.

“I’ll leave the light on, punkin,” Philip says to her, speaking loudly, as though addressing a foreigner, before calmly turning and walking out of the laundry room, shutting the door securely behind him.

Brian stands there in the hall, his veins running cold. “You want to talk about this?”

“It’ll be okay,” Philip reiterates, avoiding eye contact as he walks away, heading toward his room.

*   *   *

The worst part is that the laundry room is next door to Brian’s bedroom, and from that moment on, he hears the Penny-thing every night, clawing, moaning, straining against her bonds. She’s a constant reminder of … what? Armageddon? Madness? Brian doesn’t even have the vocabulary for what she represents. The smell is a thousand times worse than cat urine. And Philip spends a lot of time locked inside that laundry room with the dead girl, doing God-knows-what, and it drives the wedge deeper between the three men. Still in the throes of grief and shock, Brian is torn between pity and repulsion. He still loves his brother, but this is too much. Nick has no comment on the matter, but Brian can tell that Nick’s spirit is broken. The silences grow longer between the men, and Brian and Nick begin spending more time outside the apartment, wandering the safe zone, getting to know the dynamics of the inhabitants better.

Keeping a low profile, roaming the periphery of the little frontier enclave, Brian learns that the town is basically broken into two social castes. The first group—the one with the most power—includes anyone with a useful trade or vocation. Brian discovers that this first group features two bricklayers, a machinist, a doctor, a gun-store owner, a veterinarian, a plumber, a barber, an auto mechanic, a farmer, a fry cook, and an electrician. The second group—Brian thinks of them as the Dependents—features the sick, the young, and all the white-collar workers with obscure administrative backgrounds. These are the former middle managers and office drones, the paper pushers and corporate executives who once pulled down six-figure incomes running divisions of huge multinationals—now just taking up space, as obsolete as cassette tapes. With echoes of old sociology courses banging around the back of his mind, Brian wonders if this tenuous, rickety assemblage of desperate souls can ever develop into anything like a community.

The sand in the works appears to be three members of the National Guard, who wandered into Woodbury from a nearby Guard Station a couple of weeks ago and started pushing people around. This little rogue clique—which Brian thinks of as the Bullies—is led by a gung-ho former marine with a flattop haircut and icy blue eyes who goes by the name of Gavin (or “the Major,” as his underlings call him). It only takes a couple of days for Brian to peg Gavin as a sociopath with designs on power and plunder. Maybe the plague made Gavin flip his wig, but over the course of that first week in Woodbury, Brian observes Gavin and his weekend warriors snatching provisions out of the hands of helpless families and taking advantage of several women at gunpoint out behind the racetrack at night.

Brian keeps his distance, and keeps his head down, and as he makes these silent observations about Woodbury’s pecking order, he keeps hearing the name Stevens.

From what Brian can glean from scattered conversations with townspeople, this Stevens gentleman was once an ear, nose, and throat man with his own practice in a suburb of Atlanta. After the turn, Stevens set out for safer pastures—apparently alone, some believe due to a divorce. The good doctor quickly stumbled upon the motley group of survivors in Woodbury. Seeing the ragged inhabitants gripped by sickness, malnourished, and many of them nursing injuries, Stevens decided to offer his services. He’s been busy ever since, operating out of the former Meriwether County Medical Center three blocks from the racetrack.

On the afternoon of his seventh day in Woodbury, still wheezing, every breath a stab of pain in his side, Brian finally gets up the nerve to visit the squat, gray-brick building on the south end of the safe zone.

*   *   *

“You’re lucky,” Stevens says, snapping an X-ray into its clip at the top of a light panel. He points at a milky image of Brian’s ribs. “No serious breaks … just three minor fractures to the second, fourth, and fifth pectorals.”

“Lucky, huh?” Brian mutters, sitting shirtless on the padded gurney. The room is a depressing tile crypt in the basement of the medical center—once the pathology lab—now serving as Stevens’s examination room. The air reeks of disinfectant and mold.

“Not a word I’ve used that often in recent days, I will admit,” Stevens says, turning toward a stainless steel cabinet next to the light panel. He’s a tall, trim, smartly groomed man in his late forties with designer steel-frame eyeglasses riding low on the bridge of his nose. He wears a lab coat over his wrinkled oxford shirt and has a sort of weary, professorial intelligence in his eyes.

“And the wheezing?” Brian asks.

The doctor fishes through a shelf of plastic vials. “Early stage pleurisy due to the damage to the ribs,” he mumbles as he searches the medication. “I would encourage you to cough as much as possible … it’s going to hurt, but it’ll prevent secretions from pooling in the lungs.”

“And my eye?” The stabbing pain in Brian’s left eye, radiating up from his bruised jaw, has worsened over the last few days. Every time he looks in the mirror, his eye seems more bloodshot.