“They do make a good pair, though, don’t they?” David says with a gleam in his eyes.
“Oh please,” Lilly murmurs with mild disgust. The last thing she wants to do is get involved with a twenty-two-year-old, especially a kid as annoyingly flirty as Austin Ballard. Over the past three months—since he drifted into Woodbury from the north, arriving malnourished and dehydrated with a ragtag group of ten—he’s hit on just about every single woman not yet in menopause.
If pressed, however, Lilly would have to concede that Austin Ballard is what her old friend Megan would call “easy on the eyes.” With his curly mane and long lashes, he could easily kindle Lilly’s lonely soul. Plus there seems to be more than meets the eye about the kid. Lilly has seen him in action. Underneath the pretty-boy looks and roguish charm lies a tough, plague-hardened young man who seems to be more than willing to put himself on the line for his fellow survivors.
“Lilly likes to play hard to get,” Austin prods, still with that sideways grin. “But she’ll come around.”
“Keep dreaming,” Lilly mutters as the truck vibrates and rumbles.
The gears kick in, and the cargo hold shudders as the vehicle slowly pulls forward.
Lilly hears a second engine—a big diesel—revving outside the hatch. Her stomach clenches slightly at the sound as she realizes that the exit is opening.
* * *
Martinez watches the semitrailer slowly backing away from the breach, its vertical stack spitting and spewing exhaust, opening up a twenty-five-foot gap in the barricade.
The woods adjacent to Woodbury reveal themselves in the pale sun a hundred yards away. No walkers in sight. Yet. The sun, still low in the sky, streams through the distant trees in hazy motes, burning off the predawn fog.
Pulling forward another twenty feet, Martinez brings the truck to a stop and rolls down his window. He peers up at two gunners perched on a cherry picker, which is pushed up against the corner of the wall. “Miller! Do me a favor, will ya?”
One of the men—a skinny African American in an Atlanta Falcons jersey—leans over the edge. “You name it, boss.”
“While we’re gone, keep the wall clear of biters. Can you do that for me?”
“Will do!”
“We want an easy entryway back in. You follow me?”
“We’re on it, man! No worries!”
Martinez lets out a sigh, rolling his window back up. “Yeah, right,” he mumbles under his breath, slamming the truck into gear and then stepping on the gas. The vehicle rumbles away into the dusky morning.
Just for an instant, Martinez glances through the driver’s side window at the side mirror. Through veils of dust stirred up by the massive tires, he sees Woodbury receding into the distance behind them. “No worries … sure. What could possibly go wrong?”
* * *
It takes them half an hour to get to Interstate 85. Martinez takes Woodbury Road west, weaving through the abandoned carcasses of cars and trucks littering the two-lane, keeping his speed between forty and fifty miles per hour in the unlikely event some errant biter tries to lumber out of the woods and latch on to them.
As the cargo truck intermittently swerves between wrecks, the rocking motion keeps the folks in back holding on to their seats. Feeling nauseous, Lilly studiously avoids brushing up against Austin.
En route to the interstate, they pass Greenville, another little farming community along Highway 18 that is practically the mirror image of Woodbury. Once upon a time, Greenville was the county seat, a quaint little enclave of redbrick government buildings, white capital domes, and stately Victorian homes, many of which were on the historic registry. Now the place lies demolished and drained of all life in the harsh morning sun. Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly can see the rubble—boarded windows, broken colonnades, and overturned cars.
“Looks like Greenville’s been picked clean,” David Stern comments morosely as they stare out the back at the passing devastation. Many of the windows bear the telltale spray-paint mark—a big capital D in a circle, meaning DEAD, meaning “Don’t bother”—which adorns many of the buildings in this part of the state.
“What’s the plan, Dave?” Austin asks, cleaning his fingernails with a hunting knife, an affectation that annoys Lilly immensely. She can’t decide whether it’s a genuine habit or strictly for show.
David Stern shrugs. “I guess the next town over—Hogansville, I think it is—has a grocery store that Martinez thinks is still viable.”
“Viable?”
Another shrug from David. “Who knows … it’s all process of elimination.”
“Yeah, well … let’s just make sure we don’t get eliminated in the process.” He turns and pokes an elbow gently against Lilly’s ribs. “Get it, Lilly?”
“Hardy-har-har,” she says, and then glances back out the rear.
They pass a familiar access road snaking off the main two-lane, a tall roadside sign glaring in the morning sun. The trademark logo, with its gold sunburst, leans to one side, the big blue letters cracked and faded and strafed with bird shit:
Walmart
Save money. Live better.
A cold trickle of dread sluices down Lilly’s midsection as she remembers the events of the previous year. At this very Walmart, she and Josh and their contingent from Atlanta first stumbled upon Martinez and his goons. In flashes of woozy memories, Lilly remembers finding guns and supplies … and then running into Martinez … the standoff … Megan freaking out … and then Martinez doing his sales pitch … and finally Josh agonizing over whether or not they should try Woodbury on for size.
“What’s wrong with this joint?” Austin jerks his thumb toward the defunct retail outlet as they roar past the lot.
“Everything’s wrong with it,” Lilly murmurs under her breath.
She sees stray walkers wandering the Walmart’s parking lot like hellish revenants, the overturned cars and scattered shopping carts so weather-beaten and fossilized they now have weeds growing up through their guts. The gas station islands are blackened and scorched from the fires that ravaged the place back in February. And the store resembles an ancient ruin of broken glass and sagging metal, empty cartons and boxes vomited out of gaping windows.
“Place got picked clean of food and supplies long ago,” David Stern laments. “Everybody and their brother had a go at it.”
As they pass the Walmart, Lilly gets a glimpse through the fluttering tarp of the rural farmland north of the property. The shadows of walkers—from this distance as small and indistinct as bugs under a rock—inch back and forth beneath the foliage and behind the dead cornstalks.
Since the advent of the herd last year, walker activity has picked up, the population of living dead growing and spreading into the backwaters and desolate farmlands that once lay fallow and deserted. Rumors have circulated that ragtag groups of scientists in Washington and underground labs out West are developing behavioral models and population forecasts for the reanimated dead, and none of it is promising. Bad news hangs over the land, and it hangs right now in the dimly lit cargo hold of the transport truck, as Lilly tries to push dark thoughts from her mind.
“Hey, Barbara.” Lilly shoots a glance at the gray-haired woman sitting across from her. “Why don’t you tell us the famous story again?”
Austin gives a good-natured roll of the eyes. “Oh, God … not this again.”
Lilly gives him a look. “You be quiet. C’mon, Barbara, tell us the honeymoon story.”
Austin rubs his eyes. “Somebody shoot me.”
“Shush!” Lilly pokes Austin, then looks at the older woman and manages a smile. “Go ahead, Barbara.”
The gray-haired woman grins at her husband. “You want to tell it?”
David puts his arm around his wife. “Sure, this’ll be a first … me doing the talking.” He looks at the older woman with that glimmer in his eye, and something passes between the two of them that reaches out across the dim enclosure and squeezes Lilly’s heart. “Okay
… first of all, it was back in the prehistoric days when I still had black hair and a prostate that worked.”
Barbara gives him an amused punch in the arm. “Can you just cut to the chase, please? These people can do without your entire urinary history.”
The truck rumbles over a railroad track, rattling the cargo hold. David holds on to his perch, then takes a deep breath and grins. “The thing is, we were just kids … but we were madly in love.”
“Still are, for some reason … God knows why,” Barbara adds with a smirk, giving him a loaded glance.
David sticks his tongue out at her. “So anyway … we found ourselves headed to the most beautiful place on earth—Iguazu, Argentina—with nothing but the clothes on our backs and about a hundred bucks in pesos.”
Again Barbara chimes in: “If memory serves, ‘Iguazu’ means ‘the Devil’s throat,’ and it’s basically a river that runs through Brazil and Argentina. We read about it in a guidebook, and we thought it would be the perfect adventure.”
David sighs. “So, anyway … we get there on a Sunday, and by Monday night we had hiked all the way upriver—maybe five miles—to this incredible waterfall.”
Barbara shakes her head. “Five miles?! Are you kidding me? It was more like twenty-five!”
David winks at Lilly. “She exaggerates. Trust me … it was only like twenty or thirty kilometers.”
Barbara playfully crosses her arms across her chest. “David? How many kilometers are in a mile?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know, honey, but I’m sure you’re about to tell us.”
“Like one point six … so thirty kilometers would be about twenty miles.”
David gives her another look. “Can I tell the story? Is that all right with you?”
She looks away petulantly. “Who’s stopping you?”
“So we find this amazing waterfall, and I mean, this is the most beautiful waterfall on earth. From a single point, you’re practically surrounded, three hundred and sixty degrees, and the water’s roaring all around you.”
“And rainbows!” Barbara marvels. “Everywhere you look. It really was something.”
“So then,” David goes on. “Lover-girl here decides to get frisky.”
Barbara grins. “I just wanted to give him a little hug, that’s all.”
“And she’s feeling me up with the water rushing all around us—”
“I wasn’t feeling you up!”
“She was all over me. And all of a sudden, she goes, ‘David, where’s your wallet?’ And I feel the back of my jeans, and sure enough, the thing’s gone.”
Barbara shakes her head, reliving the moment for the millionth time. “My fanny pack was empty, too. Somebody had ripped us off somewhere along the line. Passports, ID, everything. We were stuck in the middle of Argentina and we were stupid Americans, and we had no effen clue what to do with ourselves.”
David smiles to himself, holding the moment in his memory like a precious heirloom he keeps in a drawer. Lilly gets the feeling that this is something essential for the Sterns, something unspoken but as powerful as the motion of the tides or the gravitational tug of the moon. “We get back to the closest village and make a few calls,” David continues, “but there’s no embassy for miles and the cops are about as helpful as a poke in the eye.”
“We’re told we have to wait for our ID issues to be sorted out in Buenos Aires.”
“Which is like eight hundred miles away.”
“Kilometers, Barbara. Eight hundred kilometers away.”
“David, don’t start.”
“Anyway, we have a few centavos left in our pockets—the equivalent of what, Barbara? A buck fifty? So we find a little village and talk a local guy into letting us sleep on the floor of his barn for fifty centavos.”
Barbara smiles wistfully. “It wasn’t exactly the Ritz but we made do.”
David grins at her. “Turned out the man ran a little restaurant in town, and he agreed to let us work there while we waited for our passports to be ironed out. Babs waited tables while I worked in back, slinging chorizo and making menudo for the locals.”
“Funny thing was, it turned out to be one of the best times of our lives.” Barbara lets out a pensive sigh. “We were in such a different environment, and all we had to rely on was each other, but that was … it was … nice.” She looks at her husband and for the first time, her wrinkled, matronly face softens. A look comes over her—just for an instant—that obliterates time, erases all the years, and turns her back into a young bride in love with a good man. “In fact,” she says softly, “it was even kinda sorta terrific.”
David looks at his wife. “We were stuck there for—what? How long was it, Babs?”
“We were there for two and a half months, waiting for word from the embassy, sleeping with the goats, living off that god-awful menudo.”
“It was … an experience.” David puts his arm around his woman. He softly kisses her temple. “Wouldn’t have traded it for all the tea in Tennessee.”
The truck shudders over another series of bumps, and the noisy silence that ensues weighs down on Lilly. She had expected the story to lift her spirits. She had expected it to distract her, soothe her, maybe even put a salve on her brooding thoughts. But it has only served to pick at the scab that she has grown over her heart. It has made her feel small, alone, and insignificant.
Dizziness courses over her and she feels like crying … for Josh … for Megan … for herself … for this whole upside-down nightmare gripping the land.
At last, Austin breaks the spell with a confused furrow of his brow. “What the fuck is menudo?”
* * *
The cargo truck bangs over a series of petrified railroad tracks and enters Hogansville from the west. Martinez keeps both hands on the wheel as he scans the deserted streets and storefronts through the windshield.
The mass exodus has left the small village overgrown with prairie grass and ironweed, boarded up tight, and littered with cast-off belongings across the roadway—moldy mattresses, loose drawers, and filthy clothing clogging every gutter. A few stray walkers as ragged as scarecrows wander aimlessly in the alleys and empty parking lots.
Martinez applies the brakes and slows the truck to a steady twenty miles an hour. He sees a street sign and consults a page torn out of an old phone book, which he has taped to the dashboard. The location of the Hogansville Piggly Wiggly seems to be on the west side of town, about a half mile away. The tires crunch over broken glass and detritus, the noise drawing the attention of nearby walkers.
From the passenger seat, Gus pumps a shell into the breech of his 12-gauge. “I got this, boss,” he says, rolling down his window.
“Gus, wait!” Martinez reaches down to a duffel bag stuffed between the seats. He finds a short-barrel .357 Magnum with a silencer attached, and hands it to the portly bald man. “Use this, I don’t want the noise drawing more of ’em.”
Gus puts the scattergun down, takes the revolver, opens the cylinder, checks the rounds, and then clicks it shut. “Fair enough.”
The bald man aims the revolver out the window and picks off three corpses with the ease of a man playing a carnival game. The blasts—muffled by the noise suppressor—sound like kindling snapping. The walkers fold one by one, the tops of their crania erupting in bubbles of black fluid and tissue, their bodies sagging to the pavement with satisfying wet thuds. Martinez proceeds west.
Martinez makes a turn at an intersection blocked by the wreckage of a three-car collision, the burned-out husks of metal and glass tangled in a crumpled mess. The cargo truck skirts the sidewalk, and Gus takes down another pair of walkers in tattered paramedic uniforms. The cargo truck continues down a side street.
Just past a boarded strip mall, the Piggly Wiggly sign comes into view on the south side of the street, the mouth of the deserted parking lot crowded with half a dozen walkers. Gus puts them out of their misery with little fuss—pausing once to reload—as the truck creeps slowly
into the lot.
One of the walkers topples against the side of the truck, a fountain of oily blood washing across the hood before the body slides under the wheels.
“Fuck!” Martinez blurts as he pulls up to the front of the store.
Through the blood-smeared windshield, he can see the disaster area that is the former Piggly Wiggly. Broken paving stones and overturned flowerpots spray across the storefront, the windows all broken out and gaping jaggedly, rows of rusted-out carts lying either on their sides or smashed by fallen timbers. Inside the shadowy interior of the store, the aisles are ransacked, the shelves empty, the fixtures hanging by threads and slowly turning in the wind. “Fuck! Fuck!—Fuck!—Fuck-fuck-fuck!”
Martinez rubs his face, leaning back against the driver’s seat.
Gus looks at him. “So what now, boss?”
* * *
The tarp snaps open, the harsh light of day flooding the cargo hold. The glare makes Lilly blink and squint as her eyes adjust.
She rises to her feet and gazes down at Martinez standing outside the rear of the truck, holding the tarp open with a dour expression on his dark features. Gus stands behind him, wringing his hands. “Good news and bad news,” Martinez grumbles.
The Sterns stand up, Austin also slowly rising and stretching like a sleepy cat.
“Grocery store’s been trashed, cleaned out,” Martinez announces. “We’re S-O-L.”
Lilly looks at him. “What’s the good news?”
“There’s a warehouse out behind the store, no windows, locked up tight. Looks like people have left it alone. Could be a gold mine.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Martinez levels his gaze at Lilly. “Not sure how safe it is in there. I want everybody locked and loaded, and on their toes. Bring all the flashlights, too … looks like it’s pretty dark in there.”
They all reach for their weapons and gear. Lilly digs in her rucksack. She pulls out her guns—a pair of Ruger .22 semiautos—and checks the ammo magazines. She has two curved clips, each one loaded with twenty-five rounds. Bob taught her how to use the high-capacity mags, which make the pistols slightly unwieldy but also give her staying power if things get hectic.