“AUSTIN!!”
Lilly charges toward him, closing the gap between them in mere seconds—maybe thirty feet or so—raising both .22s as she runs, sending surgically precise blasts across the distance at the dead housewife. Direct headshots drive the monstrous woman off Austin in a series of skull-shattering eruptions of meat and glistening gray matter, until half her head is gone. She lands beside Austin, her cranium trepanned open like a hollowed-out gourd, showing a cross-section of her infected cerebrum with the scientific precision of a high school biology class. Gas expels from the depths of her malodorous brain cavity, and Austin rolls over, coughing and gagging.
Lilly reaches him, shoves her pistols into her belt, and latches onto one of Austin’s hands with the strength of an iron vise. She yanks him to his feet. “C’mon, pretty boy … we’re outta here.”
“Fine with me,” he utters in a strangled voice, levering himself up.
The two of them race toward the alcove, leading the others out of harm’s way, through a breached metal door and into the unknown chambers of Cellblock D.
* * *
Fueled by the eating frenzy, bolstered by the growing number of walkers hauling themselves through the gaps in the fences, the herd engulfs the prison grounds in short order, until multitudes of ragged, molting figures are clumsily crowding every corner, every square foot of every yard and basketball court and walkway. Some of them find entry into buildings through gaping doorways, left open by the exodus of inhabitants. The incredible noise and stink floods the passageways and echoes up into the impassive gunmetal sky.
From high on the ridges overlooking the property, the last of the fleeing inhabitants pauses to gaze back at their temporary home being overrun by the walking dead.
If there is a more indelible portrait of the world’s end, no single soul gazing back at that derelict prison property that day can think of what it would be. The vast compound stretching across several hundred acres of pastureland virtually swims with upright corpses. From such a distant vantage point, it resembles so many black dots in a hellish pointillist painting, the shambling horde filling every nook and cranny, thousands of them, many cocking their dead faces toward the uncaring heavens and letting out yawps and groans as if being consumed from the inside by their overwhelming, cancerous, inescapable hunger. The sight of it brings tears to the eyes of those who lived there in relative safety for many months. The image will live in their minds for the rest of their lives. The prison has become a bellwether of doom.
The last few souls slipping away that day into the adjacent woods stare down at the swarm only briefly, unable to bear looking at it for long before turning away and beginning the next phase of their arduous search for shelter.
* * *
A massive thud reverberates the bones of the receiving room, making everybody jump. The prison is collapsing under the weight of the onslaught, the troubling din of thousands of shuffling feet and mortified vocal cords moaning incessantly inside and out, filling the air, as the surviving members of the Woodbury militia huddle in the middle of a desolate, flyspecked, littered foyer, trying to catch their breaths and figure out their next move.
“Austin!” Lilly points at a rack along the room’s back wall, upon which are stacked signposts and flagpoles and implements. “Do me a favor and grab one of those sign poles and reinforce that side door!”
Shuffling with a limp, Austin hurries across the room and grabs one of the iron stands. He turns to a side exit situated under a powerless CORRIDOR D-1 sign and slams the object down across the middle of the door, wedging it under the broken bolt plate and a side hinge at the precise moment another muffled thud strikes outside the door.
Austin jerks with a start as plaster dust rains down and metal creaks, the force of multiple walkers outside the door pressing to get in, trying to get to the source of the human smells that are taunting them.
“They’re gonna break that fucking door in!” Matthew Hennesey cries out from the front of the room. “There’s too fucking many of them!”
“No, there’s not!” Lilly rushes over to the front entrance and starts pushing a metal credenza brimming with heavy file folders and directories across the boarded glass of the front door. “C’mon, gimme a hand with this—Matthew and Ben—get your asses over here!”
They heave and push the immense shelving unit across the door.
The room is a little less than five hundred square feet of shopworn tile flooring and painted cinder-block walls scarred with illegible graffiti and the wear and tear of generations of intake procedures. The air smells chalky and sour, like the inside of an old refrigerator. One wall houses the grimy glass-fronted guard desk, elevated to shoulder height, where newcomers became official wards of the state of Georgia. Another wall is gouged with bullet holes and the cracked, dangling, framed portraits of former wardens and state officials. A lack of power has plunged the room into cold darkness, but the ambient daylight from outside the high, barred windows provides enough illumination for Lilly to see the owlish, terrified faces of her contingent.
In addition to Lilly and Austin, the ragtag group of surviving Woodbury militia consists of the following four men and one woman, now huddled in a tight group in the middle of the receiving room: Matthew Hennesey, the twentysomething bricklayer from Valdosta, now draped in half-empty mag pouches and a sweat-soaked camo jacket; Hap Abernathy, the gaunt, graying, retired school bus driver from Atlanta who currently looks like a candidate for a hip replacement with his pronounced limp and bandaged ribs; Ben Buchholz, a pouchy-eyed man from Pine Mountain who lost his entire family last year in a swarm outside F.D. Roosevelt State Park and now appears to be flashing back to that earlier trauma; Speed Wilkins, a cocky nineteen-year-old high school football star from Athens who, at the moment, looks punch-drunk and dazed by the struggle, all his big-man-on-campus swagger long gone; and Gloria Pyne, her wounded leg wrapped in a crude bandage, her deeply creased, world-weary eyes still glowering out from underneath her I’M WITH STUPID visor, the headgear frayed and spattered with blood and soot.
Another thud makes them all jump. “Take it easy, everybody.” Lilly stands before them with her back to the front entrance door. Each of her Rugers is shoved behind her belt on an opposing hip for easy access, but the problem is, she only has about six rounds left in one magazine, and one round in another, with an extra bullet in each chamber. The sound of scraping sets her teeth on edge and the pressure makes the credenza tremble and creak as the swarm shoves against the door. “This is hugely important—that we stay calm and don’t panic.”
“Are you shitting me?!” Hap Abernathy trains his ancient, gray eyes on her. “Stay calm? Did you happen to notice how many of them things are out there? It’s only a matter of time before—”
“SHUT UP!” Austin booms at the man with fire in his eyes, his outburst uncharacteristic enough to raise even Lilly’s eyebrows. “Just shut the fuck up and let the lady talk or maybe you want to just—!”
“Austin!” Lilly gives him a gentle warning-wave of her gloved hand. She still wears the fingerless driving gloves that Austin gave her the previous night. “It’s okay. He’s just expressing what everybody’s thinking.” Lilly looks at all of them, one at a time, that voice of her father coming through. “I’m asking all of you to trust me, and I will get you out of here.”
She waits for everybody to get their breath back, get their bearings. Hap Abernathy stares at the floor, cradling his AR-15 as though it were a security blanket. Another thud makes them jerk. A cracking noise comes from the depths of the prison; something falls and shatters above them.
The walkers have gotten inside Cellblock D—one of the back entrances had been left open—but nobody knows how many of them have infiltrated the building or what parts of the prison are still secure.
“Hap?” Lilly speaks softly to him. “You okay? You with me on this?”
He nods slowly, staring at the floor. “Yes, ma’am … I’m with you.”
A beat of
noisy silence follows as the creaking noises and low, ubiquitous drone of walking dead pressing in on them grips the air with unbearable tension. The thing that nobody expresses at that moment—the gorilla in the room that they all try desperately to ignore—is Lilly’s assassination of the Governor in plain view of everybody only moments earlier. Deep down inside all of them, they expected it to happen in some form sooner or later. They are all children of an abusive father trying to recover from the inevitable yet logical outcome of situations such as these—and like abused children everywhere, they have already begun to repress their unresolved feelings. They look at Lilly now with new eyes. They wait for her to lead.
“We’re safe here in this room,” she says at last. “For the time being at least. We’ll keep close watch on the high windows, and keep the doors as secure as possible. How much ammunition does everybody have?”
It takes a moment for them to figure this out. In all the excitement, they have lost track. Matthew has the deepest reserve—a couple dozen 7.62 mm slugs in his cargo pocket, and seven more in the AK’s magazine—but the rest of them have paltry supplies. Ben’s got eleven 115-grain 9 mm rounds left for his Glock 19. Gloria’s got a full mag of 305.56 mm slugs for her AR-15, and Hap’s got a revolver with six rounds left. Speed’s got a Bushmaster with five rounds still in the clip. And Austin has a single round remaining in his M1 Garand—Gloria loans him her spare Glock 17—which makes Lilly wonder how many bullets she has left in two separate magazines for her .22 caliber pistols. She checks them and confirms that she only has four rounds remaining.
“Okay, so we’re not exactly loaded to the teeth, but we’re safe here,” Gloria finally speaks up, taking off her visor and running her fingers through her dyed red hair. “Then what? What’s the plan? We can’t just stay in this fucking room indefinitely.”
Lilly nods. “I’m thinking we wait out the swarm, give them a chance to clear a little bit.” She looks at them, giving each of them a respectful look as though offering them an option when they really have none. “We’ll stay the night, and then we’ll reassess in the morning.”
A long silence follows, but nobody argues with her.
* * *
Late that night, after each of the six survivors have staked out private little corners and recesses within the confines of the intake room (mostly for the purpose of trying to get some semblance of rest), Lilly and Austin find themselves ensconced in the shadows behind the glass-fronted receiving counter. They spread a tarpaulin from the room’s storage locker across the floor for a modicum of comfort, and now they sit slumped on the tarp, their guns on the shelf behind them, their backs resting against the file cabinets along the back wall … as the relentless drone of walkers continues unabated outside the barricaded doors and windows.
For the longest time, neither Lilly nor Austin says a word. They merely pass the time holding each other, stroking each other’s arms and hair. After all, what is there to say? The world has spiraled out of control and they’re just trying to hold on. But Lilly can’t turn her mind off. She keeps dabbing the pearls of blood oozing from her split lip with a Kleenex and noticing little things around them that don’t add up, such as the pine tree deodorizer hanging from the desk lamp above her, or the unexplained bloodstain on the ceiling, or the lump under Austin’s sleeve.
“Wait a minute,” she says at one point very late that night, her stomach growling from nerves and the empty feeling of not having eaten anything for almost twenty-four hours. She looks at the sleeve of Austin’s leather jacket and realizes there are two puncture holes directly over the lump. “What is that?”
“Okay, now don’t get all bent outta shape on me,” Austin says as Lilly reaches down and pulls up his sleeve. Under the cuff, a faded blue bandanna is wrapped around Austin’s wrist, the cloth soaked in blood.
Lilly gently pulls the bandanna back and sees the telltale puncture wounds. “Oh God no,” she utters under her breath. “Please tell me you cut yourself on the fence.”
From the look on his narrow face peering out at her through unruly tendrils of curly hair—an uncanny mixture of sadness, resolve, anguish, and calm—it’s clear he didn’t hurt himself on barbed wire.
EIGHTEEN
Already beginning to darken and turn livid around the edges with infection, the bite marks are so severe—perhaps deep enough to have nipped an artery—that it’s a miracle Austin hasn’t bled to death. Lilly springs to her feet. Mind racing, heart thumping in her chest, she yammers for a moment, “Jesus … Austin, we have to … Jesus Christ … the first-aid kits are in the … fuck … FUCK!”
Austin hoists himself to his feet, replacing the bandanna, wrapping it around the wound. He starts to say something, but Lilly is busily whirling around, madly searching the shelves and drawers of the intake office for something—anything—to stanch the infection. “We have to take care of it immediately before it … SHIT!”
She throws open drawers, rifling through old documents, dusty intake forms, office supplies, candy wrappers, empty bottles of booze. She glances back at Austin and blurts out, “A tourniquet!”
“Lilly—”
She reaches down to the tails of her denim shirt, starts ripping off a strip of fabric, her hands trembling. “We need to apply a tourniquet before—!”
“What the hell’s going on?!”
The voice comes from the opposite end of the intake counter, a figure standing outside the glass partition, audible through the pass-through slot. Gloria Pyne has a packing blanket wrapped around her, and from the puffy redness underneath her eyes she appears to be half asleep. She knocks on the glass.
Lilly takes a deep breath and tries to appear semi-calm. “It’s nothing, Gloria, it’s just—”
“What’s wrong with Austin?” She notices the bloody bandanna. Two other figures—Hap and Ben—appear behind her, gazing through the glass. “Is that a bite?” Gloria stares at the blood-soaked cloth around his wrist. “Did he get bit out there?”
“No, goddamnit, he just—”
“Lilly, come here for a second.” Austin speaks softly to her. He puts his good arm around her and gives her a gentle squeeze. He looks into her eyes and smiles sadly. “It’s too late.”
“What?!—NO!—What the fuck are you talking about?”
“It’s too late, kiddo.”
“No!—No!—Fuck no!—Don’t say that!” She gazes across the dusty vestibule and sees the entire group now gathered outside the glass, the moonbeams slanting down through the high lintels, silhouetting their tense stares. They’re all gaping at Austin.
“Lilly—” Austin starts to say, but she cuts him off with a raised hand. She turns toward the others. “Go back to sleep, goddamnit, all of you—GO ON! GO BACK! GIVE US SOME FUCKING PRIVACY!!”
Slowly, one by one, they turn away from the glass and slip back into the shadows of the foyer. In the silence that ensues, Lilly turns and searches for the right words. She will not allow him to give up.
Austin touches her face. “It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?!” She blinks away the tears. She can’t afford to cry right now. Maybe someday she’ll be able to cry again. But not now. Now she has to think of something. Fast. “Okay … look. I’m gonna have to do something radical here.”
He shakes his head calmly. “I know what you’re thinking. Unfortunately, the thing has already gone way beyond amputation, Lilly. I can feel the fever. The thing has already spread. There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late.”
“Goddamnit, would you stop saying that!” She pulls away from him. “I’m not gonna lose you!”
“Lilly—”
“No, no … this is unacceptable!” She licks her lips, gazing around the enclosure, thinking, searching for some answer. She looks back at Austin, and she sees the expression on his face, and all at once the fight goes out of her, and she realizes there is, indeed, nothing she can do for him. Like a balloon deflating, she sags, letting out an ang
uished sigh. “When did it happen? Was it that big lady walker, jumped you before we came inside?”
He nods. His expression remains tranquil, almost beatific, like a person who’s had a religious conversion. He strokes her shoulder. “You’re gonna survive this thing. I just know it. If anybody can do it, you can.”
“Austin—”
“The time I got left … I don’t want to, like, dwell on it. You know what I mean?”
Lilly wipes the tears from her eyes. “There’s so much we don’t know. I heard about this one victim, up near Macon, who never turned. They got a fucking finger chewed off, and they never fucking turned.”
Austin lets out a sigh, smiling to himself. “And unicorns exist.”
She takes him by the shoulders, and burns her gaze into his eyes. “You’re not gonna die.”
He shrugs. “Yeah. I am. We all are. Sooner or later. But you got a good shot at avoiding it for a long time. You’re gonna get outta here.”
She wipes her face, the sorrow and horror rising up her gorge and threatening to break her into a million pieces. But she stamps it down, shoves it back, swallows it … hard. “We’re all gonna get out of here, pretty boy.”
He gives her another weary nod, and then he sits back down on the tarp, leaning back against the wall. “If I’m not mistaken, I think I saw a flask in one of those drawers you were banging around in.” He gives her one of his patented rock-star smiles, brushing wisps of curly hair from his ashen face. “If there’s a God, there’ll be liquor left in there.”
* * *
They stay wide awake the rest of the night, sharing the last few fingers of stale hooch in the flask left behind by some overworked intake guard. Throughout the wee hours, they talk softly, careful not to be heard by the others out in the foyer, discussing everything but Austin’s bite wound. They talk about how they’re going to get out of this place, whether they might find any supplies in other parts of the prison, and how they might avoid the infestation of walkers currently skulking around the corridors of the building.