“Where are you from, Lilly?” Nalls asks with the casual deference of a man taking a census.
“What difference does it make?”
“Married?”
“Who gives a shit?”
The old man sighs, blowing air across his lips. “These are not trick questions, Lilly, just making idle conversation while we wait.”
“What are you, my date?” Lilly wisecracks, then gives the side of that aging gray head a closer look. “I heard somebody call you the chemist. Is that what you did at Pfizer?”
“Precisely.” He sits up straighter despite the tendril of blood on his shriveled neck. “I have found that chemistry is the basis of everything. Life, death, love, hate, happiness, sorrow, joy, and pain. Chemistry bonds the atomic particles of space and time. It is the thread that stitches together the universe, and chemistry, Lilly, is the thing that will ultimately get us out of this mess.”
“That’s all really heartwarming.” Lilly says this more to herself than anybody else. “But what good does all this beautiful poetry do us if—”
The sound of hurried footsteps interrupts her train of thought, cutting off her words.
Bandanna Man comes around the corner of an adjacent hallway with a roll of narrow thermal paper curled in his hand, a readout from some sort of diagnostic apparatus. He has a strange look on his face, eyes wide with excitement, lips pressed tight with barely contained exhilaration. He approaches the old man with awe and reverence in his step.
Without moving his head, Nalls gives the man a loaded glance. “Well…?”
The man in the bandanna just smiles and proffers the kind of nod one proffers when notified of a promotion or a tumor turning out to be benign.
The old man stares. “You’re certain of it?”
Bandanna Man nods, his smile widening. “I ran the test twice.” A big grin here. “Finally got one.”
Nalls blinks. Then he gazes at Lilly as though looking at a white tiger. He turns to Bryce and says very softly, “Let the children go.”
* * *
They give Lilly a few seconds to say goodbye. They let her do it at the top of the fifth-floor stairs at the end of the main corridor. Bryce and Bandanna Man watch from a few feet away, their guns at the ready, as the children take turns giving Lilly desperate, tear-sodden hugs, crying into the fabric of her flannel shirt.
“We can’t just leave you here,” Bethany Dupree sobs, hugging Lilly so tightly it feels to Lilly as though her internal organs are being compressed. “We h-have to stick together.”
Kneeling, Lilly embraces the little girl, stroking the back of the child’s hair. “You have to go, sweetheart. It’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. You and Tommy have to take care of the baby.”
The girl gazes up at Lilly through enormous, wet, blue eyes. “But y-you said it yourself, we stick together, always … always s-stick together.”
“I know … things change.” Lilly holds her by the shoulders. “Look at me. You’re strong. You have to go and protect your brother.”
The girl sobs. The other children look down, some of them crying so hard now their little lungs are hitching and shuddering. The baby squalls. Tommy holds the infant, carefully bouncing it. Lilly rises to her feet and addresses the group. “You all have to be strong. Look for Norma. She’s out there somewhere. Do what Tommy and Bethany say and you’ll make it.”
Tommy hands the shrieking baby over to Bethany. He looks at Lilly. “I’m not going.”
Lilly feels the shell around her heart cracking. “You have to go.”
Tommy’s eyes well up but he continues to give her that macho chin-jut. “No fucking way, I’m not going. I’m staying with you.”
“You have to go, Tommy. You’re the only one who can get these kids back.” She hugs him, his body rigid as he fights the tears. He knows he has to go, and Lilly knows he knows it. She holds him. “I love you.”
Tommy loses it in her arms. He cries and cries into the crook of her neck, his sobs carrying up into the rafters of the gloomy corridor. The boy cries so hard that the two hardened men standing guard behind Lilly turn away. Even Bryce looks down at the floor.
Lilly tries to hold on to her wits, tries to control her emotions. She has to be strong for this beautiful boy. She hugs the wiry young man and whispers in his ear, “Try and find the train yard, stay close to the tracks, stay low and keep moving south.” She swallows her sorrow and attempts a smile. “You’re my son now, Tommy. I’m proud of you, and I will always love you. Always. Always.”
The sorrow breaks through suddenly and courses through Lilly. She lets the tears come, and she weeps into Tommy’s shoulder. She sobs so hard her throat goes sore and hoarse. Her tears soak the boy’s shirt. She lets the storm move through her.
Then she gets her bearings back and gently disengages herself from the boy. She stands back and gives Tommy a nod. “It’s time to go.”
* * *
Lilly can’t bear to watch the children leave. She turns away as Tommy and Bethany lead the gaggle of sniffling, shell-shocked kids through the emergency exit doors and down the stairwell. The ghostly echoes of the baby’s caterwauling bounce around the cement enclosure.
Staring at the warped, decaying parquet tiles of the hospital corridor, Lilly hears the tiny shuffling footsteps reverberating in the stairwell, fading away as the kids make their reluctant descent down the iron steps. She feels dizzy. Her nose is running and she wipes the snot and salty tears from her face.
Within moments, the skittering footsteps fade to silence. A distant squeak somewhere in the maze of lower floors, followed by a metallic clang, signals the fact that the children have made their departure from the building. The sound is a death knell, a spike thrust through Lilly’s heart. She swallows the anguish and grief. She tells herself right then—she makes a vow—that she will see her children again or she will die trying. She is thinking about this when she hears the baritone burr of Bryce’s voice to her immediate left.
“All right … we good?”
Lilly looks up. “I wouldn’t say that exactly.”
“But we’re done, right? Done with our little part of the bargain?”
Lilly shrugs. “Yeah, I guess you could say that.”
“Good.”
Lilly doesn’t see the balled fist coming at her until it’s too late to do anything about it: Bryce tags her squarely between the eyes with massive force, just above the bridge of the nose, a practiced roundhouse punch designed to send the recipient to the mat. The effect is similar to a cut-to-black in a movie, Lilly losing consciousness well before the moment when the floor rises up to meet the side of her head with an audible thud.
PART 4
Perchance To Dream
They will drink and stagger and go mad because of the sword that I will send among them.
—Jeremiah 25:15
SIXTEEN
… floating.…
… without form, without purpose, without memory, without identity, gliding over a patchwork quilt of ravaged land, farm fields blackened and scourged, streams and rivers running dirty crimson red, and the multitudes of ragged, naked, moldering souls wandering, aimless, maggots upon the earth …
… in the winds of the upper atmosphere she opens her mouth to scream and nothing comes out.…
* * *
… later …
… running, running …
… down a snaking blacktop road, across the threshold of a bridge, arms pinwheeling madly, breath chugging in tattered gasps, she races down the narrow planking, balance gone, side panging, vision blurring …
… she manages to glance over her shoulder and sees the horde on her tail, a thousand strong, squeezing into that narrow passage of a bridge, all those milky eyes locked onto her, palsied arms reaching for her, all those rotten lips working around slimy teeth, spurring her on, faster, faster toward the far side, toward freedom …
… without warning, all at once, the bridge collapses and she falls through the maw …
/> … gravity claiming her …
… plummeting through space, shrieking a silent scream, plunging toward …
* * *
… home …
… at last …
… she’s home, in her little condo on Delaney Street, in her bedroom …
At first, it doesn’t occur to her that there’s anything strange going on here—it’s morning, it’s a workday, the clock says 6:31 A.M., and the sound of Megan’s ubiquitous hair dryer is crooning in the bathroom at the end of the hall. All is well.
She takes a deep breath, drags herself out of bed, and pads across the room to her closet.
She rifles through her outfits, looking for a clean outfit to wear to work. She chooses a macramé vest to wear over a nude-colored bra. Ripped jeans go on next, the cuffs rolled up over her high suede boots. She remembers there’s a storewide meeting today among all departments, and she wants to represent her Handbags and Accessories Corner in style.
While she dresses, the room begins to bleed. Subtle at first, silent, just beyond the boundaries of her peripheral vision, the deep crimson fluid begins to seep from cracks and seams in the molding along the edges of the ceiling, tracking in slender rivulets like tears oozing down the surface of the cabbage rose wallpaper. She stares as the blood begins pooling on the carpet along the baseboard.
Stricken with shame, mortified, frantic that somebody will see the mess and blame her, she goes through her drawers for something with which to sop up the evidence. She finds her mother’s funeral dress—the navy-blue shift, the one with the staples up the back. She grabs it, gets down on her hands and knees, and begins wiping up the blood. But it’s futile. The dress is not even remotely absorbent, and the blood is like greasy paint.
Somebody left the TV on in the background, a droning anchorperson on the increasingly troubling reports of a new pandemic spreading across the earth. A strange commercial comes on. At first she merely hears a disembodied voice as she furiously wipes up the blood: “I promise we shall do our very best to keep this process as pain-free as possible.”
Pain-free?
She glances over her shoulder. On the twelve-inch TV screen she sees a blurry image of an old man wearing a white sterile mask, his saggy, gray eyes staring into the camera. What kind of cockamamie soap opera is this? General Hospital? The Young and the Institutionalized? The man gazes out at us, the viewers, as he talks: “You’re going to feel a faint pinch, Lilly, and then a cold sensation in your arm, both of which are normal.”
The old man fiddles with something off screen, his mask obscuring most of his deeply lined, leathery features. His voice is disturbingly familiar to Lilly, and sends chills down her back as she hears her name spoken behind the mask. “There, that’s good, Lilly … perfect. Such a good patient. Each draw will take an hour or so, but such details should not concern you at this point.”
Lilly gets up, storms over to the dresser, and switches the TV off.
Then she’s somewhere else. She’s in a tunnel that stretches into the shadows ahead of her, a narrow channel of leprous stone and moldy timbers framing stalactites of calcium deposits and ancient cage lights dangling down, flickering and blinking at odd intervals. She moves cautiously. She feels the breath of monsters on her neck. She holds an ice cream cone that’s melting. The sticky white liquid runs down her wrist, drips to the tunnel floor.
She stops. Her skin crawls. In the reflection of the melted ice cream she sees the ghostly, faded silhouette of the old man with his sterile mask—a doctor, she presumes—continuing to address her: “I’ve taken the liberty of administering a twilight-inducing agent into your bloodstream, which will not only ease your pain, but will virtually make the passage of time seem irrelevant.” Lilly flinches, jerking away from the puddle with a start, dropping the soggy sugar cone, as the nasally voice behind the mask continues. “You may even find it strangely pleasant, and you might dream. Your dreams may be vivid.”
A familiar voice rings out next to her. “Are you okay?”
“What?” She turns and looks into the droopy, hound-dog eyes of Bob Stookey. He stands next to her, his flesh as white as ivory. “I’m fine,” she tells him. “Why?”
“You just jumped.”
“I did?”
Bob frowns. “Did you take something? Did you drop that last tab of acid?”
Lilly backs away from him. He’s supposed to be dead. Something bubbles up within Lilly, something inchoate and terrifying. She feels the tendons of the world stretching to the breaking point. Her vision blurs.
She stumbles deeper into the tunnel, and then she’s somewhere else.
The girls’ barracks back at the Kennesaw Sleepaway Camp—the place she spent her summers during her middle school years—is now deserted and run-down, many of the bunk beds overturned, the knotty pine walls green with mold, the floor littered with human bones. Lilly tries to get out through the door, but finds it locked. She looks out a window.
The landscape is decimated, a barren wasteland of bare trees and seared ground. It looks like the surface of a dead planet.
Lilly sits down in front of the window and waits for her dad to pick her up.
* * *
Weeks pass. Months. Years maybe. Lilly feels as though she has been sitting in front of that window for most of her life now. She feels as though the soles of her feet have grown into the floorboards like the stubborn roots of a tree. She can’t move.
Then all at once she’s somewhere else. She’s back in Megan’s condo, in the living room, on the couch, watching The Young and the Restless on TV, when a volley of thunder rattles the foundation and shivers across the sky outside. She springs to her feet, races across the room, and slams out the front door. The green light and static electricity of a storm greets her, slashes her face with drizzle and wet winds.
The neighborhood swims in bleary, watercolor-streaked light. The huge dormer window rising off the condo’s front roof-pitch has a wrought-iron weathervane on its crown that now spins wildly in the gusts. The tops of trees toss and rage as Lilly scurries across the courtyard to where her car was parked a moment ago but now is missing.
She hears the ghostly voice: “Another day, another draw. And you continue to be so brave. You’re doing so well, Lilly. I’m so proud of you. Just continue to relax and dream, and we’ll take another 250 cc’s of your remarkable blood.”
Her car sits at the end of the block, a boxy little onyx-black Volkswagen Jetta. She hurtles toward it, but abruptly comes to a halt on the edge of the yard, looking down at the puddle spreading across the gutter, the cold, needling rain hammering down on her.
She wipes her eyes, blinks, and stares at the oily surface of the puddle.
The phantom face, as pale as a milk cloud in coffee, partially obscured by that white cotton sterile mask, undulates as it addresses her: “Do you know that you are the star donor here? Such beautiful veins you have. Today we’ll harvest another 500 cc’s of whole blood and even run some platelets on the side for good measure. There is no telling how many lives you will be saving, Lilly. You should be very, very proud, so very proud.”
The ghost takes his mask off and reveals the cadaverous, sunken cheeks and yellow smile of Doctor Raymond Nalls, formerly of Norfolk, Virginia. In his decaying, corroded smile Lilly can read an entire pandemic, the end of days, a world coming to a close—her memory flooding back as the lightning slashes down and strikes her between the shoulder blades.
* * *
Her eyelids snap open. Pupils dilate. The sharp scent of ammonia fills her nostrils. She can’t swallow, can barely draw a breath. Something is weighing her down, something invisible crouching on her chest. All around her are impressions of dim light, pale surfaces, and rectangular patterns. She blinks and tries to move. Her body feels as though it’s encased in cement. She blinks some more and realizes she’s staring at a ceiling, the rectangular patterns revealing themselves to be ancient corkboard tiles, so old that their original color has faded from ivory to soo
t gray.
It’s a while before she realizes she’s lying supine on a gurney, engulfed in the stale reek of disinfectant and unidentifiable acrid chemicals. Her throat feels parched. She realizes she’s so thirsty she can barely swallow. But right now she concentrates on moving. She finds that sitting up is too ambitious at this point. Moving her head might be the next best thing. But when she tries to turn her face to her immediate left, she is met with an alarming paralysis. It feels as though someone has driven a railroad spike down the center of her skull and into her spine.
All of which suddenly strikes her as hilarious. The thought of having a metal spear thrust down her core seems so ridiculous—in fact, comical—that she lets out a staccato burst of laughter that mingles with the strange noises that are slowly registering in her midbrain. If she could only find some water, maybe she could think. She’s so thirsty, she can’t think straight.
The noises intensify. She’s been hearing the sounds ever since she came awake in this absurd room with its musty-sharp odors and stupid ceiling tiles. At first, the clamor seemed to exist in some remote universe light-years from here, irrelevant, white noise that has no purpose or bearing on her current situation. But gradually, the din has slowly registered before she’s even been capable of identifying it, strumming some auditory nerve deep within her and sending warning signals to her brain. The distant cacophony comes from behind a door or wall, the muffled gunshots, screams, and crashing noises practically drowned by the unmistakable drone of walkers.
Walkers.
The word percolates up through her consciousness with startling power, filling her brain with half-formed images and memories that flicker and pop and make her giggle. But the snickering that comes out of her is brittle and hysterical in her own ears. There’s nothing funny about the associations unfurling in her mind right now in the wake of that word. She remembers where she is, the plague, the struggle to survive, the loss of her father, Megan, Josh, Austin, the kids, and the world shutting down like a vast candle flame guttering out. Megan has been dead for almost three years. Then Lilly remembers the kidnapping. She remembers ending up in the ruins of the Atlanta Medical Center some time ago—days, weeks, months—and now she realizes she’s still inside that crumbling edifice.