Brian breathes out a painful, weary sigh. The others are silent.
In the lull, they can hear the faint noises that they’ve been hearing all night, coming from the darkness outside: the muffled, intermittent thudding of insensate figures bumping up against the makeshift barricade.
Despite Philip’s efforts to erect the rampart quickly and quietly, the commotion of the day’s construction project has drawn more of the walking corpses.
“How long do you think we’re gonna be able to stay here?” Brian asks softly.
Philip sits down, lays the nail gun on the table and takes another sip of his bourbon. He nods toward the family room, where the whimsical voices of children’s programming drift incongruously. “She needs a break,” Philip says. “She’s exhausted.”
“She loves that play set out back,” Brian says with a weak smile.
Philip nods. “She can live a normal life here for a while.”
Everybody looks at him. Everybody silently chews on the concept.
“Here’s to all the rich motherfuckers of the world,” Philip says, raising his glass.
The others toast without really knowing just exactly what they’re toasting … or how long it will last.
FOUR
The next day, in the clean autumn sun, Penny plays in the backyard under the watchful gaze of Brian. She plays throughout the morning while the others take inventory and sort through their supplies. In the afternoon, Philip and Nick secure the window wells in the basement with extra planking, and try unsuccessfully to rig the nail gun to DC power, while Bobby, Brian, and Penny play cards in the family room.
The proximity of the undead is a constant factor, swimming sharklike under the surface of every decision, every activity. But for the moment, there’s just an occasional stray, an errant wanderer bumping up against the privacy fence, then shambling away. For the most part, the activity behind the seven-foot cedar bulwark on Green Briar Lane has, so far, gone unnoticed by the swarm.
That night, after dinner, with the shades drawn, they all watch a Jim Carrey movie in the family room, and they almost feel normal again. They’re all starting to get used to this place. The occasional muffled thump out in the darkness barely registers now. Brian has practically forgotten the missing twelve-year-old, and after Penny goes to bed, the men make long-term plans.
They discuss the implications of staying in the Colonial as long as supplies hold out. They’ve got enough provisions for weeks. Nick wonders if they should send out a scout, maybe gauge the situation on the roads into Atlanta, but Philip is adamant about staying put. “Let whoever’s out there duke it out among themselves,” Philip advises.
Nick is still keeping tabs on the radio, TV, and Internet … and like the failing bodily functions of a terminal patient, the media seem to be sparking out one organ at a time. By this point, most radio stations are playing either recorded programming or useless emergency information. TV networks—the ones on basic cable that are still up and running—are now resorting to either twenty-four-hour automated civil defense announcements or inexplicable, incongruous reruns of banal late-night infomercials.
By the third day, Nick realizes that most of the radio dial is static, most of basic cable is snow, and the Wi-Fi in the house is gone. No dial-up connections are working, and the regular phone calls Nick has been making to emergency numbers—which, up to this point, have all played back recordings—are now sending back the classic “fuck you” from the phone company: The number you have dialed is not available at this time, please try again later.
By late morning that day, the sky clouds over.
In the afternoon, a dismal, chill mist falls on the community, and everybody huddles indoors, trying to ignore the fact that there’s a fine line between being safe and being a prisoner. Other than Nick, most of them are tired of talking about Atlanta. Atlanta seems farther away now—as if the more they ponder the twenty-some miles between Wiltshire and the city, the more impassable they seem.
That night, after everybody drifts off to sleep, Philip sits his lonely vigil in the living room next to a slumbering Penny.
The mist has deteriorated into full-blown thunder and lightning.
Philip pokes a finger between two shutter slats, and he peers out into the darkness. Through the gap, he can see—over the top of the barricade—the winding side streets and massive shadows of live oaks, their branches bending in the wind.
Lightning flickers.
Two hundred yards away, a dozen or so humanoid shapes materialize in the strobe light, moving aimlessly through the rain.
It’s hard to tell for sure from Philip’s vantage point, but it looks as though the things might be moving—in their leaden, retarded fashion, like stroke victims—this way. Do they smell fresh meat? Did the noises of human activity draw them out? Or are they simply lumbering around randomly like ghastly goldfish in a bowl?
Right then, for the first time since they arrived at Wiltshire Estates, Philip Blake begins to wonder if their days in this womb of wall-to-wall carpet and overstuffed sofas are numbered.
* * *
The fourth day dawns cold and overcast. The pewter-colored sky hangs low over the wet lawns and abandoned homes. Although the occasion goes unspoken, the new day marks a milestone of sorts: the beginning of the plague’s second week.
Now Philip stands with his coffee in the living room, peering out through the shutters at the jury-rigged barricade. In the pale morning light, he can see the northeast corner of the fence shuddering and trembling. “Son of a buck,” he mutters under his breath.
“What’s the matter?” Brian’s voice snaps Philip out of his stupor.
“There’s more of ’em.”
“Shit. How many?”
“Can’t tell.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Bobby!”
The big man trundles into the living room in his sweatpants and bare feet, eating a banana. Philip turns to his portly pal and says, “Get dressed.”
Bobby swallows a mouthful of banana. “What’s going on?”
Philip ignores the question, looks at Brian. “Keep Penny in the family room.”
“Will do,” Brian says, and hurries off.
Philip starts toward the stairs, calling out as he goes: “Get the nail gun and as many extension cords as you can carry … hatchets, too!”
* * *
FFFFFFFOOOMP! Number five goes down like a giant rag doll in tattered suit pants, the dead, milky eyes rolling back in its head as it slides down the other side of the fence, its putrid body collapsing to the parkway. Philip steps back, breathing hard from the exertion, damp with sweat in his denim jacket and jeans.
Numbers one through four had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel—one female and three males—all of whom Philip had sneaked up on with the nail gun as they bumped and clawed against the weak spot at the fence’s corner. At that point, all Philip had to do was stand on the bottom strut with a good angle on the tops of their heads. He put them down quickly, one after another: FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP!
Number five had been slippery. Inadvertently jerking out of the line of fire at the last moment, it did a little intoxicated shuffle, then craned its neck upward at Philip, jaws snapping. Philip had to waste two nails—both of which ricocheted off the sidewalk—before he finally sent one home into the suit-wearing asshole’s cerebral cortex.
Now Philip catches his breath, doubled over with exhaustion, the nail gun still in his right hand, still plugged into the house with four twenty-five-foot cords. He straightens up and listens. The front parkway is silent now. The fence is still.
Glancing over his shoulder, Philip sees Bobby Marsh in the backyard, about a hundred feet away. The big man is sitting on his fat ass, trying to catch his breath, leaning against a small abandoned doghouse. The doghouse has a little shingle roof and the word LADDIE BOY mounted above the opening at one end.
These rich people and their fucking dogs, Philip thinks
ruefully, still a little manic and wired. Probably fed that thing better than most kids.
Over the back fence, about twenty feet away from Bobby, the limp remains of a dead woman are draped over the crest, a hatchet still buried in her skull where Bobby Marsh put out her lights.
Philip gives Bobby a wave and a hard, questioning look: Everything cool?
Bobby returns the gesture with a thumbs-up.
Then … almost without warning … things begin happening very quickly.
* * *
The first indication that something is decidedly not cool occurs within a split second of Bobby signaling the thumbs-up sign to his friend and leader and mentor. Drenched in sweat, his heart still pumping with the burden of his huge girth as he sits leaning against the doghouse, Bobby manages to accompany the thumbs-up signal with a smile … completely oblivious to the muffled noise coming from inside the doghouse.
For years now, Bobby Marsh has secretly yearned to please Philip Blake, and the prospects of giving Philip the thumbs-up after a messy job well done fills Bobby with a weird kind of satisfaction.
An only child, barely able to make it out of high school, Bobby clung to Philip in the years before Sarah Blake had died, and after that—after Philip had drifted away from his drinking buddies—Bobby had desperately tried to reconnect. Bobby called Philip too many times; Bobby talked too much when they were together; and Bobby often made a fool of himself trying to keep up with the wiry, alpha dog of a ringleader. But now, in a strange way, Bobby feels as though this bizarre epidemic has—among other things—given Bobby a way to bond again with Philip.
All of which is probably why, at first, Bobby doesn’t hear the noise inside the doghouse.
When the thump comes—as if a giant heart were beating inside the little miniature shack—Bobby’s smile freezes on his face, and his upturned thumb falls to his side. And by the time the realization that there’s something inside the doghouse—something moving—manages to travel the synapses of Bobby’s brain and register plainly enough for him to move, it’s already too late.
Something small and low to the ground bursts out of the doghouse’s arched opening.
* * *
Philip is already halfway across the yard, running at a full sprint, when it becomes clear that the thing that has just thrust its way out of the doghouse is a tiny human being—or at least a rotting, bluish, contorted facsimile of a tiny human being—with leaves and dog shit in its filthy, matted blond bangs, and chains tangled around its waist and legs.
“F-FUH-FFUHHHHK!” Bobby yelps and jerks back away from the twelve-year-old corpse as the thing that was once a boy now pounces on Bobby’s ham-hock-sized leg.
Bobby tumbles sideways, ripping his leg free in the nick of time, just as the little contorted face—like a sunken gourd with hollow cavities for eyes—gobbles the grass where Bobby’s leg had been one millisecond earlier.
Philip is now fifty feet away, charging toward the doghouse at top speed, raising the nail gun like a divining rod aimed at the miniature monster. Bobby crawls crablike through the damp grass, his ass crack showing pathetically, his gasps high and shrill like those of a little girl.
The pint-sized fiend moves with the graceless energy of a tarantula, scuttling across the grass toward Bobby. The fat man tries to struggle to his feet and run, but his legs get tangled and he tumbles again, backward this time.
Philip is twenty feet away when Bobby starts shrieking in a higher register. The zombie child has hooked a clawlike hand around Bobby’s ankle, and before Bobby can wrest his leg away from the thing, it sinks a mouthful of putrefying teeth into Bobby’s leg.
“GODDAMNIT!” Philip booms as he approaches with the nail gun.
A hundred feet behind him, the extension cord pulls free of the outlet.
Philip slams the tip of the nail gun down on the back of the thing’s skull as the monster latches on to Bobby’s quivering, fat body.
The nail gun trigger clicks. Nothing happens. The zombie burrows down into Bobby’s flaccid thigh, piranhalike, breaching his femoral artery and taking half his scrotum with it. Bobby’s scream deteriorates into a ululating howl as Philip instinctively tosses the gun aside, then lurches at the beast. He tears the thing off his friend as though removing a giant leech and heaves it—head over heels—across the lawn before it has a chance to take another bite.
The dead child flops and rolls twenty feet across the muddy grass.
Nick and Brian burst out of the house, Brian grabbing for the extension cord, Nick roaring across the lawn with a pickaxe. Philip grabs Bobby and tries to stop him from squirming and screaming, because the extra exertion is making the big man hemorrhage faster, the ragged wound already sending up geysers of blood in rhythm with Bobby’s quickening pulse. Philip slams his hand down on Bobby’s leg, stanching the flow slightly, the blood oozing between Philip’s greasy fingers, as other figures move across Philip’s peripheral vision. The dead thing is crawling back across the moist ground toward Philip and Bobby, and Nick does not hesitate, approaching at a sprint, raising the axe, eyes wide with panic and rage. The axe sings through the air, the rusty point coming down on the back of the zombie-child’s skull, sinking three inches into the cranial cavity. The monster deflates. Philip screams up at Nick something about a belt, a BELT, and now Nick is hovering, fumbling for his belt. Philip has no formal training in first aid but he knows enough to try and stop the bleeding with some kind of tourniquet. He wraps Nick’s belt around the shivering fat man’s leg, and Bobby is trying to talk again but he looks like a man experiencing extreme cold, his lips moving, quivering silently. Meantime—as all this is going on—Brian is a hundred feet away, plugging the extension cord back in the outlet, probably because it’s all he can think of doing. The nail gun lies in the grass fifteen feet behind Philip. At this point, Philip is shouting at Nick to GO GET SOME FUCKING BANDAGES AND ALCOHOL AND WHATEVER!!! Nick hurries off, still carrying the pickaxe, while Brian approaches, staring at the dead thing lying facedown in the grass, its skull stoved in. Brian gives it a wide berth. He picks up the nail gun—just in case—and he scans the hill behind the back fence as Philip now holds Bobby in his arms like a giant baby. Bobby is crying, breathing quick, shallow, rattling breaths. Philip comforts his friend, murmuring encouragement and assuring him that it’s all going to be okay … but it’s clear, as Brian cautiously approaches, that things are definitely not going to be okay.
* * *
Moments later, Nick returns with an armful of large sterile cotton bandages from inside, as well as a plastic bottle of alcohol in one back pocket and a roll of cotton tape in the other. But something has changed. The emergency has transformed into something darker—a deathwatch.
“We gotta get him inside,” Philip announces, now soaked in his friend’s blood. But Philip makes no effort to lift the fat man. Bobby Marsh is going to die. That much is clear to all of them.
It’s especially clear to Bobby Marsh, who now lies in a state of shock, staring up at the gunmetal sky, struggling to speak.
Brian stands nearby, holding the nail gun at his side, staring down at Bobby. Nick drops the bandages. He lets out an anguished breath. He looks as though he might start to cry, but instead he simply drops to his knees on the other side of Bobby and hangs his head.
“I—I—n-n-nn—” Bobby Marsh tries desperately to get Philip to understand something.
“Sssshhhhh…” Philip strokes the man’s shoulder. Philip cannot think straight. He turns, grabs a roll of bandages, and starts dressing the wound.
“Nnn-n-NO!” Bobby pushes the bandage away.
“Bobby, goddamnit.”
“NN-NO!”
Philip stops, swallows hard, looks into the watery eyes of the dying man. “It’s gonna be okay,” Philip says, his voice changing.
“N-no—it ain’t,” Bobby manages. Somewhere way up in the sky, a crow yammers. Bobby knows what’s going to happen. They saw a man in a ditch back in Covington come back in less than ten min
utes. “S-ss-stop saying that, Philly.”
“Bobby—”
“It’s over,” Bobby manages in a feeble whisper, and his eyes roll back for a moment. Then he sees the nail gun in Brian’s hand. With his big bloody sausage fingers, Bobby reaches for the muzzle.
Brian drops the gun with a start.
“Goddamnit, we gotta get him inside!” Philip’s voice is laced with hopelessness as Bobby Marsh blindly reaches for the nail gun. He gets his fat hand around the pointed barrel and tries to lift it to his temple.
“Jesus Christ,” Nick utters.
“Get that thing away from him!” Philip waves Brian away from the victim.
Bobby’s tears track down the sides of his huge head, cleansing the blood in streaks. “P-please, Philly,” Bobby murmurs. “J-just … do it.”
Philip stands up. “Nick!—C’mere!” Philip turns and walks a few paces toward the house.
Nick rises to his feet and joins Philip. The two men stand fifteen feet away from Bobby, out of earshot, their backs turned, their voices low and strained.
“We gotta cut him,” Philip says quickly.
“We gotta what?”
“Amputate his leg.”
“What!”
“Before the sickness spreads.”
“But how do you—”
“We don’t know how fast it spreads, we gotta try, we owe the man at least that.”
“But—”
“I’m gonna need ya to go get the hacksaw from the shed and also bring—”
A voice rings out behind them, interrupting Philip’s tense litany: “Guys?”
It’s Brian, and from the grim sound of his nasally call, the news is most likely bad.
Philip and Nick turn.
Bobby Marsh is stone-still.
Brian’s eyes well up as he kneels next to the fat man. “It’s too late.”
Philip and Nick come over to where Bobby lies in the grass, his eyes closed. His big, flabby chest does not move. His mouth is slack.
“Oh no … Sweet Jesus Christ no,” Nick says, staring at his dead pal.