Then she snaps out of her daze and hurriedly ushers the old man into the cab.
* * *
“We’re going in circles,” Lilly cautions, squeezed between the driver and the old man in the massive cab as the vehicle weaves through the mazelike streets. She presses an ice scraper that she found under the seat against the old man’s fractured arm and winds the remaining duct tape around it to form a makeshift splint. Nalls lets out an anguished breath, wincing with each twinge of pain.
Ahead of them, the iron-reinforced grill plows through slower-moving clusters of dead, sideswiping stagnant pockets of biters along the roadways, making the bomb-resistant chassis shudder and thump at irregular intervals. The wipers are on, squeegeeing blood instead of rain.
“Try Glenwood Avenue,” Lilly suggests, turning to stare out the side window. “Maybe we can get out of town to the west, avoid I-20.”
Hunched over the steering wheel, his breathing labored and wheezy, Cooper Steeves struggles to stay alert despite his deteriorating condition. The brim of his fedora is soaked in sweat. Multiple gunshots reveal themselves inside his bomber jacket, his shirt displaying a Rorschach pattern of deep-scarlet bloodstains. His face is so pale it looks almost gray in the dying light of the afternoon. He grips the wheel with white-knuckle effort. “I know a shortcut,” he announces in a strangled voice. “Through Grant Park, m-maybe, maybe if the Cherokee entrance is passable.”
Lilly nods, completing the jury-rigged splint, and gently laying the old man’s arm across his lap. She throws a glance out the side window at the passing cityscape.
The desolation of southern Atlanta is heartbreaking. Not a single square block is free of the dead. The air has a chemical reek of sulfur, decay, and ammonia—the way it must smell in hell, Lilly silently muses. Most of the tall buildings—once upon a time forming a great skyline of modern architecture—now look ravaged by lightning, cleaved by glaciers, and lined in moss and mold. The burned-out shells of empty floors are windblown and sun-bleached, crawling with innumerable tattered, shadowy, shuffling silhouettes. A few moments ago, they passed Turner Field, and the devastation reminded Lilly of the sunken, ruined porticos of the Roman Empire, a modern wreck of a coliseum that would most likely never, ever play host again to anything but random wandering death.
“It was Bryce, in case you’re wondering.” The voice, barely audible above the singing of the engine and the hissing of wind, draws Lilly’s attention back to the driver.
“Bryce shot you?”
A feeble nod from Steeves. “Best I can tell, it started when we got attacked by a group from the outside, not sure what they were after. Resources, guns. Whatever. But when everything fell apart, I tried to intercede and s-save some of the folks from Moreland. Haddie Kenworth, Joel … the young man with the tattoos.” He pauses, his head lolling, his eyelids lowering to half-mast. Lilly grabs the wheel, which wakes him back up. He swallows hard and blinks. “Forgive me, sorry about that. I’m fine.”
“What happened then, Cooper?”
“After the building was overrun, I stumbled on some car keys in the control group room. They were in Daniels’s pocket … poor son of a bitch. They used him, by the way. After you … dealt with him. He turned, and they used him for m-months to harvest infected blood.”
“Go on.”
“I procured his keys and fought my way down to the motor pool in the sublevels. Took a while to figure out what vehicle these keys corresponded to. I almost made it. I was climbing into the Humvee when he caught me.” Steeves pauses, launching into a coughing fit. Delicate little sprays of blood spittle spume out of him, spattering the steering column.
Lilly watches. “Bryce?”
Steeves gives a nod. “Shot me three times in the back before I managed to get the vehicle started. Barely got out of there alive. I’m no physician but I believe one of the bullets nicked my lung.”
Lilly licks her lips and chooses her words. “Cooper, we’ll get you—”
“No.” He waves a bloody hand, not exactly dismissing her but instead alleviating her of niceties. “I won’t be benefiting from medical attention. Too late for that. I’m resigned to it.”
Lilly looks at him. “Cooper, I have to ask you. How could you have ever sided with these people—after what they did to the towns? Indiscriminately murdering almost three dozen people? How could you even trust—”
“To be fair,” the old man interjects from the other side of the cab, his voice shaky and breathless with agony, “we never caused any harm to anyone unless they fought back.”
“Are you serious?” Lilly shoots him a look. “Who’s not going to push back? You people roar into town and take folks against their will, take their loved ones in the dark of night, take everything that matters. ‘We’re just gonna borrow your wife for a sec, your children—nothing to worry about.’ Nobody knows your higher purpose, your noble cause. Fuck your noble cause. As far as we know, you’re basically going to rape and kill us.”
The old man stares into his lap, rubbing his arm and softly muttering, “Efforts were made, at first, to inform people of our agenda, but alas…”
“Alas?!” Lilly clenches her teeth, working hard to keep the rage under control. “Alas what?!”
Nalls shakes his head. “People are quick to f-fire upon strangers these days … no matter what the motives of the newcomers. We just simply did not get the opportunities to explain ourselves before the situations … escalated. But we never fired first.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Steeves chimes in, his voice weakening yet still taut with outrage. “When they showed up in Moreland, I had to beg Daniels to tell me why … why you would take these risks, killing anybody who gets in your way. I had to cajole and pry the answers out of him. And that was with the barrel of a gun in my face!”
The old man looks down, his voice fading. “I will not apologize for our methods. They became … necessary. I won’t deny they were harsh but they were necessary.”
Lilly looks at the chemist. “How do you know the way it went down? You weren’t even there!”
“I was at first,” the old man says with another shudder of pain and regret. “But I’m not exactly the sergeant at arms I used to be.” He lets out another sigh of agony. “The fact is … no amount of hand wringing will bring any of these people back. It’s history now … part of the past. The only thing that matters now is what’s in this portfolio … and what’s up here.” He points a trembling finger at his forehead. “Because the only thing that does truly matter now is the future … and whether or not we have one.”
They drive in silence for a long moment, mulling that one over.
* * *
Steeves focuses on the cluttered road ahead of them, weaving a serpentine path between a series of overturned vehicles, sideswiping the rusty carcasses, and telling himself that he’ll hand the wheel over if he starts to lose consciousness.
If he does lose consciousness, it will very likely be the last time he’ll pass out before the inevitable claims him. He has fainted several times since tangling with Bryce. While trying to navigate the wreckage-strewn streets of the medical center’s campus, looking for a clear escape route, he felt the atrial fibrillation of old heart surgeries. He knows enough about blood loss and catastrophic injury to know that a couple of ounces of peroxide and a few strips of blanket fabric wrapped around his sucking wounds are not going to stave off anything. He knows all too well that his internal bleeding is worsening, and he’s slowly but surely slipping into hypovolemic shock.
He shivers as he drives, blinking and biting the inside of his cheek to stay awake. His extremities feel numb, almost frostbitten with encroaching paralysis. His ears ring, and he can feel his heart racing with a weak, out-of-rhythm pulse. His fingers tingle as if asleep. He’s about to give up, pull over, and quietly let death come, when he says, “Caul, I have to be honest with you. I never really was that fond of you.”
Lilly lets out an annoyed, breathy grunt. The grunt transforms
into a dry, terse little chuckle, and the annoyance changes to amusement. Then she’s laughing out loud. Her laughter is dark and sardonic, and neither of the other two men joins in, nor do they seem to even get the joke. Lilly wipes her eyes and just says, “Duly noted.” Her laughter fades. “For the record, the feeling’s mutual.”
Steeves feels his head lolling forward; his skull seems to weigh a ton. “I always thought you were dangerous,” he manages to add.
“That’s good to know,” Lilly Caul says with a shrug.
“Do you know why I thought you were dangerous?”
“Because I always refused to take any of your holier-than-thou shit?”
He shakes his head. “No. That’s not the reason. That’s not it at all.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
He flinches at a sharp pain in his chest, his heart seizing up. The cold spreads down his gut, through his tendons. His hands are slippery on the steering wheel with cold sweat, his vision blurring. The Humvee drifts.
Lilly looks at him. “Cooper? You okay? You still with us?”
Steeves blinks and puts every last ounce of energy into saying, “I always thought y-you were dangerous … because you give people hope.”
Lilly stares, thinking about it. “Cooper?”
His eyes droop. His voice is as low and soft as a prayer. “And you n-never give up … ever.”
* * *
Lilly registers the words at the same time Cooper Steeves finally succumbs to massive blood loss and organ failure. He slumps forward against the steering wheel, his head lolling over the top of it, tiny rivulets of blood foaming from his mouth. Miraculously, by some random quirk of positioning, Steeves’s deadweight pressing against the wheel, or the leverage of the dying man’s boot on the accelerator, the Humvee continues hurtling down a side street at nearly thirty miles an hour, unabated, practically driving itself. Lilly is reaching for the wheel when she hears the old man’s voice piercing the cab’s interior.
“LILLY, LOOK OUT!”
She manages to yank the wheel just in time to avoid slamming into the concrete barrier of a bus stop. Its awning clips the roof of the Humvee, making a muffled scraping noise and sending shards of broken glass across the windshield. Steeves’s limp form sags against Lilly as she tries to reach the brake pedal with her left leg.
They careen across the opposite side of the street and slam through a row of garbage cans brimming with three-year-old refuse.
Paper, detritus, and the petrified bones and crusts of ancient food explode across the Humvee’s hood. The metal garbage cans skitter like bowling pins, making an awful racket that echoes down the labyrinth of narrow streets and reverberates up over the spires of hollowed-out high-rises. Lilly finally feels the edge of the brake pedal with her left boot and slams it to the floor, making the tires screech and sending the entire massive vehicle into a momentary sideways skid.
The Humvee comes to a rest after smashing into a broken fire hydrant in the shadow of a tall brick tenement building. The impact throws Lilly and the old man against the dash, knocking them momentarily senseless. They gasp almost in unison, slamming back into the seats, the air knocked out of them. They don’t yet see the ragged figures emerging from the mouths of alleyways and the shadows of vestibules on either side of the street behind them.
NINETEEN
Lilly shakes off the pain and catches her breath and makes a quick survey of their situation. She notices the Humvee’s reinforced grill has caved in on one side at the point of impact. The engine has died and steam rises from beneath the crumpled hood, the radiator most likely damaged. The dash has lit up with warning lights. The indicator that catches her eye is the fuel gauge. The needle is below E. She turns and quickly assesses the old man’s condition and asks him, “Can you walk?”
He groans as he shifts his weight in the seat. He glances out his window at the big side mirror. He swallows the pain and says, “Run is more like it.”
“What?”
He points at the mirror. “Our commotion has drawn the swarm.”
“Fuck … I knew it.” Lilly digs in her pocket and feels a few loose bullets from the carton of ammo that she tore open back outside the hospital. She has only a few left—three or four—and nothing in the cylinder. She looks at the old man. “You still have the .38, right?”
He nods and pulls it from the back of his belt. “A lot of good it’ll do us without ammunition.” He glances nervously back at the side mirror. “We need to make some executive decisions, they’re getting closer.”
Lilly is about to climb out of the cab when she hears the soft murmur of Cooper Steeves, very likely the last words he will ever utter. “… never give up … never … ever … ever.…”
She gapes at his ivory-white face as he goes very still, as still as a porcelain figurine. She reaches down to her boot for her knife.
The gesture is almost involuntary by this point—putting the punctuation at the end of a long sentence. She draws the knife and raises it. She pauses. Something about the man’s face at rest calls out to her. Cooper Steeves—self-styled adventurer, insufferable know-it-all—has returned to his default self. In the tranquil, endless sleep of death, he is reduced to the face of an innocent, slumbering, guileless little boy. Lilly can’t bare to mar the illusion with the pointed end of the tactical knife.
“Lilly, please.” The old man claws at the passenger door, frantic to get out. “If you’re going to do it, do it now or you’ll have to do us as well!”
She looks away and thrusts the knife into the man’s skull above his ear—a single hard, sudden jab—as abrupt as a dentist pulling a tooth.
The blade goes in deep, the man’s cerebral fluids gushing around the hilt. Lilly pulls it out decisively. Cooper Steeves flops back against the seat, the blood from the wound sluicing down his white, bloodless face in ribbons of deep crimson. The blood looks like a mask.
Lilly wipes the blade on Cooper’s shirt, shoves the knife back into her boot, grabs her satchel, and quickly glances over her shoulder.
About fifty feet away from the Humvee’s tail, a pack of several dozen creatures approaches in the washed-out sunlight. Two of the older ones—both male—are completely nude, their pectorals, bellies, and genitals dangling like marsupial pouches, their livid flesh bearing the gruesome suture tracks of autopsies. The others are from all walks of life, large and small, both eviscerated and intact. All of their faces are deeply furrowed with the trademark scowl of the hungry dead, their mouths working hectically, their rheumy eyes pinned open. The electric buzz of a feeding frenzy crackles from one face to another.
Lilly shoves the old man out of the open passenger door and then pushes her way out herself.
A moment later, the dead descend upon the Humvee and Steeves’s remains, and the interior of the cab becomes a noisy abattoir as the lucky ones sink their teeth into the still-warm body.
* * *
To refer to the limping, lurching, half trot, half shuffle that Dr. Raymond Nalls employs in order to flee the swarm as “running” is a wild misnomer and exaggeration. This awkward locomotion is all he can manage for any extended period of time, and by the time they reach the end of Waldo Street, Lilly is seriously considering throwing the emaciated old codger over her shoulder and carrying him. They approach the intersection of Waldo and Glenwood, and Lilly decides to head west down Glenwood.
Bad decision. A wall of upright cadavers blocks their path—at least a hundred strong—spanning the wide street with scores of shark eyes as luminous as silver road reflectors in the dusk. The noise is incredible, the acrid stench hanging like a fog bank. Lilly scuttles to a sudden halt, the old man nearly crashing into her.
Without a word, without a sound, she grabs Nalls by the nape of his undershirt and pulls him back toward the intersection—back the way they have just come—so hard that the chemist is nearly pulled out of his shoes. If Lilly could just find a suitable building in which to hide—someplace that’s still relativel
y sealed from the outside world—they might have a chance. But every broken-down address that they pass is either overrun or impassable.
They circle back north, toward Cabbagetown, toward the residential areas.
They take Wylie, a seemingly deserted access road that runs along the ruins of the Hulsey Train Yard. Mile after mile of derelict boxcars line the tracks now, many of them lying on their sides, most ransacked, all overgrown with opportunistic vines and kudzu as thick as shrouds. Above the tracks, the trestles drip with Spanish moss, and human remains litter the embankment as if an ancient battlefield has been left to the elements. Clouds of insects drift and dance like motes in the rays of the dying sun. Lilly and Nalls move as silently as possible under the shadows of the trestles, along the fossilized track, careful to make minimal noise.
Nalls slows to a limping shuffle, his breathing so labored and sickly that he sounds like a dying animal. Lilly walks ahead of him, every few moments glancing over her shoulder to make sure he hasn’t collapsed. She carries the portfolio now, keeping it safely tucked inside her satchel. She has two bullets left. A pair of .38-caliber bullets to ward off a million cannibals. She carries the hope of the world—literally—on her shoulder now. She still believes they’ll make it. Or at least she tells herself they will. She tells herself they must make it.
They hear another surge of vocalizations on the wind, another wave of death-stench wafting in, raising the hairs on the backs of their necks. Deeper shadows move across the warrens of side streets. Lilly sees another intersection ahead of them: Cherokee Avenue.
By this point, the sun has melted behind the horizon, and darkness has closed in like a predator sniffing at their heels. The alleys are plunged into dense darkness. The buildings are turned into silhouettes. Sounds begin to travel differently through the air. Lilly can hear their own footsteps now like pistol shots. She can smell rain on the wind, mingling with the rising odor of the dead. She can hear the far-off rattle of thunder—a storm moving into the area—the air pressure changing around them.