Now Josh cocks his head at her, his grin fading. “Why do I all of a sudden get the feeling there’s a ‘but’ in here somewhere?”
Lilly licks her lips thoughtfully. “This plague, this epidemic, whatever it is … it does things to people … makes them do things they wouldn’t dream of doing any other time.”
Josh’s big brown face falls. “What are you sayin,’ babydoll? Something’s bothering you.”
“I’m just saying … maybe … I don’t know … maybe I’ve let this thing between us go a little too far.”
Josh looks at her, and for a long moment he seems to grope for words. He clears his throat. “Ain’t sure I’m following you.”
By this point the walkers have overrun the backyard. Unheard through the thick glass, their atonal chorus of snarling, moaning vocalizations drowned under the drumming of sleet, the enormous regiment closes in on the house. Some of them—the old long-haired hospital patient, a limping woman without a jaw, a couple of burn victims—have closed the distance to within twenty yards. Some of the monsters stupidly stumble over the lip of the swimming pool, falling through the snow-matted tarp, while others follow the leaders with bloodlust radiating from their cue-ball eyes.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Lilly is saying inside the hermetically sealed environment of the stately glass house. “I will always love you, Josh … always. You are amazing. It’s just … this world we’re in, it twists things. I never want to hurt you.”
His eyes moisten. “Wait. Hold up. You’re saying being with me is something you would never dream of doing at any other time?”
“No … God, no. I love being with you. I just don’t want to give the wrong impression.”
“The wrong impression about what?”
“That our feelings for each other … that they’re—I don’t know—coming from a healthy place.”
“What’s unhealthy about our feelings?”
“I’m just saying … the fear fucks you up. I haven’t been in my right mind since all this shit went down. I don’t ever want you to think I’m just using you for protection … for survival, is what I mean.”
The tears well up in Josh’s eyes. He swallows hard and tries to think of something to say.
Ordinarily he would notice the telltale stench seeping into the circulatory systems of the house, the odors of rancid meat braised in shit. Or he would hear the muffled basso profundo drone outside the walls of the house—coming from outside the front and sides of the building now, not just the backyard—so resonant and low it seems to be vibrating the very foundation. Or he would see the teeming movement out of the corner of his eye, through the lozenge windows across the front foyer, behind the drawn drapes in the living room, coming at them from all directions. But he doesn’t notice a thing beyond the assault on his heart.
He clenches his fists. “Why the hell would I ever think something like that, Lil?”
“Because I’m a coward!” She burns her gaze into him. “Because I fucking left you to die. Nothing will ever change that.”
“Lilly, please don’t—”
“Okay … listen to me.” She gets her emotions under control. “All I’m saying is, I think we should take it down a notch and give each other—”
“OH, NO—OH, SHIT—SHIT SHIT!!”
In a single instant, the sudden alarm on Josh’s face drives all other thoughts from Lilly’s mind.
* * *
The intruders first make themselves known to Josh in a reflection on the surface of a framed family photograph across the room—a stiffly smiling assemblage of the previous owners, including a standard poodle with ribbons in its hair, the framed portrait mounted above a spinet piano—the ghostly silhouettes moving across the picture like spirit images. The faint double image reveals the house’s panoramic rear window, the one behind the sofa, through which a battalion of zombies is now visible pushing toward the house.
Josh springs to his feet and whirls around just in time to see the rear window cracking.
The closest zombies—their dead faces mashed up against the glass, squashed by the slow-motion stampede behind them—trail black bile and drool across the window. It all happens very quickly. The hairline fissures spreads like time-lapse spiderwebs spinning toward each corner, as dozens of additional reanimated corpses press against the throng, exerting tremendous pressure on the window.
The glass collapses just as Josh grabs Lilly and yanks her off the sofa.
A terrific crack, like a lightning bolt striking the room, accompanies the birthing of hundreds and hundreds of arms, thrusting forward, jaws snapping, bodies tumbling over the back of the sofa on a wave of broken glass, the wet wind rushing into the gracious family room.
Josh moves without thinking, dragging Lilly with one hand across the arched hall toward the front of the house, as the hell choir of dead vocal cords chirr and grind behind them, filling the stately home with zoo noises and the stench of death. Insensate, twitching in their hunger, the zombies take very little time regaining their legs, rising back up from where they had fallen and quickly trundling forward, flailing and growling, lumbering toward their fleeing prey.
Crossing the front vestibule in a flash, Josh rips open the front door.
A wall of the undead greets him.
He flinches and Lilly shrieks, jerking back with a start, as the battery of dead arms and pincerlike fingers reach for them. Behind the arms, a mosaic of dead faces snarl and sputter, some of them drooling blood as black as motor oil, others flayed open and glistening with the pink sinew and musculature of their damaged facial tissue. One of the curled hands hooks a gob of Lilly’s jacket, and Josh tears it away while letting out a booming howl—“FUCKERS!!”—and then on a jolt of adrenaline Josh gets his free hand around the edge of the door.
He slams the door on half a dozen flailing arms, and the impact—combined with Josh’s strength, as well as the deluxe quality of the heavy-duty door—severs each of the six appendages.
Flopping limbs of varying lengths splatter and quiver across the rich Italian tile.
Josh grabs Lilly and starts back toward the center of the house, but pauses at the foot of the spiral staircase when he sees the place is flooding with moving corpses. They have entered through the screen door in the mudroom on the east side of the house, and they’ve climbed in through the dog door on the west side, and they’ve wriggled in through cracks in the solarium on the north side of the kitchen. Now they surround Josh and Lilly at the base of the stairs.
Grabbing Lilly by the nape of her jacket, Josh pulls her up the steps.
On their way up the circular staircase, Josh draws his .38 and starts shooting. The first shot flashes and misses its mark entirely, chipping a divot out of the lintel along the archway. Josh’s aim is off because he is dragging Lilly up the stairs one riser at a time, as the growling, gnashing, flailing horde awkwardly follows.
Some of the walkers cannot negotiate the stairs and slide back down, while others topple to their hands and knees and manage to keep crawling. Halfway up the spiral, Josh fires again and hits a dead skull, sending wet matter across the newel posts and chandelier. Some of the zombies tumble back down the steps like bowling pins. But now, so many of them are on the risers that they begin to clamber over each other, inching up the stairs with the frenzied hunger of salmon spawning. Josh fires again and again. Black fluids bloom in the thunder cracks, but it’s futile, there are too many, far too many to fight off, and Josh knows it, and Lilly knows it.
“THIS WAY!”
Josh hollers at her the moment they reach the landing on the second floor.
The idea occurs to Josh fully formed, all at once, as he drags Lilly down the hallway toward the last door at the end of the corridor. Josh remembers checking the master bedroom the previous day, finding some useful pharmaceuticals in the medicine cabinet, and admiring the view from the second-floor bay window. He also remembers the enormous live oak standing sentry next to the window.
“IN HERE!”
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The walkers reach the top of the stairs. One of them bumps the banister and stumbles backward, bowling over half a dozen other zombies, sending three of them toppling. The threesome skids down the curvature of the stairs, leaving slime trails of oily blood.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the hall, Josh reaches the bedroom door, throws it open, and pulls Lilly inside the spacious room. The door slams behind them. The silence and calm of the bedroom—with its Louis XIV furnishings, immense four-poster bed, luxurious Laura Ashley duvet, and mountain of frilly, ruffled pillows—provide surreal contrasts to the reeking, noisy menace coming down the hall outside the door. The shuffling footsteps loom. The stench grips the air.
“Get over by the window, babydoll! Be right back!!” Josh whirls and makes a beeline for the bathroom, while Lilly goes over by the huge bay window with its velveteen window treatments. She crouches down, breathlessly waiting.
Josh tears the bathroom door open and lurches into the deluxe, soapy-smelling chamber of Italian tile, chrome, and glass. There amid the Swedish sauna and enormous Jacuzzi tub he throws open the vanity cabinet under the sink. He finds the economy-sized brown bottle of rubbing alcohol.
Within seconds he has the bottle open and is back in the main room, dousing everything, flinging the clear liquid on the curtains and bedding and antique mahogany furniture. The pressure of dead weight making wooden seams creak—the noise of moving corpses piling up against the bedroom door—spurs Josh on.
He tosses the empty bottle and lunges toward the window in a single leap.
Outside the beautifully etched and leaded-glass panorama, framed in delicate ruffled curtains, a gigantic old oak stands over the roof pitches, its twisting limbs, bare in the winter light, reaching up past the weather vane at the crest of the roof. One of the gnarled limbs reaches across the second-floor window, coming within inches of the bedroom.
Josh muscles open the center window on wrought-iron hinges. “C’mon, girlfriend, time to abandon ship!” He kicks out the screen, reaches for Lilly, pulls her up and over the sill, shoves her through the gap, and out into the freezing winds. “Climb across the limb!”
Lilly awkwardly reaches out for the spiraling limb, which is the width of a ham hock, with bark as rough as cement stucco, and she holds on with a desperate vise grip. She starts shimmying her way out across the limb. The wind whistles. The twenty-foot drop seems to stretch away as though glimpsed through a backward telescope. The coach house roof wavers in and out of focus below—barely within jumping distance—as Lilly inches toward the center of the tree.
Behind her, Josh ducks back into the bedroom just as the door collapses.
Zombies pour into the room. Many of them tumble over each other, drunkenly reaching and snarling. One of them—a male missing an arm, with one eye socket cratered out as black and empty as cancer—trundles quickly toward the big black man, who stands by the window, digging frantically in his pocket. The air fills with a groaning cacophony. Josh finds his Zippo cigar lighter.
Just as the eyeless walker pounces, Josh sparks the butane and flings the lighter at the alcohol-dampened skirt around the bed. Flames blossom immediately, as Josh kicks out at the attacking zombie, sending the cadaver stumbling back across the floor.
The walker bounces across the burning bed and sprawls to the alcohol-sodden carpet as the fire licks up the pilasters. More corpses move in, agitated by the flaring light and heat and noise.
Josh wastes no time spinning around and vaulting back toward the window.
* * *
It takes less than fifteen minutes for the second floor of the glass house to go up, another five minutes for the infrastructure to collapse into itself on a tidal wave of sparks and smoke, the second floor plunging down onto the first, catching the staircase and gobbling through the warren of antiques and expensive floor coverings. The throngs of walkers inside the home are immolated by geysers of flames, the conflagration fueled by the methane of decay oozing off all the reanimated corpses. Within twenty minutes, more than eighty percent of the swarm from the ravine is vanquished in the firestorm, reduced to charred crisps inside the smoking ruins of the stately home.
Oddly, over the course of those twenty minutes, the nature of the house—with its spectacular enclosure of wraparound windows—acts as a chimney, accelerating the blaze but also burning it out quickly. The hottest part of the fire goes straight up, singeing the tops of the trees but containing the damage. The other homes in the area are spared. No sparks are carried on the winds, and the telltale cloud of smoke remains obscured behind the wooded hills, unseen by the citizens of Woodbury.
In the time it takes for the house to burn itself out, Lilly finds enough nerve to vault from the lowest limb of the oak to the roof of the coach house and then climb down the back wall to the rear door of the garage. Josh follows. By that point only a few walkers remain outside the home, and Josh easily dispatches them with the remaining three slugs in the .38’s cylinder.
They get into the garage and find the duffel bag, in which they had stashed some of their previous day’s take for safekeeping. The heavy canvas carryall contains a five-gallon jug of gasoline, a sleeping bag, a drip coffee machine, two pounds of French Roast, winter scarves, a box of pancake mix, writing tablets, two bottles of kosher wine, batteries, ballpoint pens, expensive red current jam, a box of matzo, and a coil of mountain-climbing rope.
Josh reloads the police special with the last six slugs in his speed loader. Then they sneak out the back door with the duffel bag over Josh’s shoulder, and they creep along the outer wall. Crouching in the weeds near the corner of the garage, they wait until the last moving corpse has drifted toward the light and noise of the fire before darting across the property and into the adjacent woods.
They weave their way through the trees without exchanging a word.
* * *
The access road to the south lies deserted in the waning daylight. Josh and Lilly keep to the shadows of a dry creek bed running parallel to the winding blacktop. They head east, down the long sloping landscape, back toward town.
They cover a little more than a mile without speaking, acting like an old married couple in the aftermath of a quarrel. By this point, the fear and adrenaline have finally drained out of them, replaced by a shaky kind of exhaustion.
The near miss of the home attack and ensuing fire has left Lilly in a state of panic. She jumps at noises on either side of the path, and she cannot seem to get enough air into her lungs. She keeps smelling walker stink on the wind, and she thinks she hears shuffling sounds behind the trees, which may or may not be mere echoes of their own weary footsteps.
At last, as they turn the corner at the bottom of Canyon Road, Josh says, “Just let me get one thing straight: Are you saying you’re just using me?”
“Josh, I didn’t—”
“For protection? And that’s it? That’s as far as your feelings go?”
“Josh—”
“Or … are you saying you just don’t want me to feel like you’re doing that?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, baby, I’m afraid you did, that’s exactly what you said.”
“This is ridiculous.” Lilly puts her hands in the pockets of her corduroy jacket as she walks. A layer of grime and ash has turned the fabric of the coat soot gray in the late-afternoon light. “Let’s just drop it. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“No!” Josh is slowly shaking his head as he walks. “You don’t get to do that.”
“What are you talking about?”
He shoots a glance at her. “You think this is like a passing thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like this is summer camp? Like we’re all gonna go home at the end of the season after losing our virginity and getting poison ivy.” His voice has an edge. Lilly has never heard this tone before in Josh Lee Hamilton’s voice. His deep baritone skirts the fringes of rage, his jutting chin belying the hurt slicing through him. “You don’t
get to plant this little bomb and walk away.”
Lilly lets out an exasperated sigh and cannot think of what to say, and they walk in silence for a while. The Woodbury wall materializes in the distance, the far western edge of the construction site coming into view, where the bulldozer and small crane sit idle in the waning light. The construction crew has learned the hard way that zombies—like game fish—bite more in the twilight hours.
At last Lilly says, “What the hell do you want me to say, Josh?”
He stares at the ground as he walks and ruminates. The duffel bag rattles, banging on his hip as he trudges along. “How about you’re sorry? How about you’ve been thinking it over, and maybe you’re just scared of gettin’ close to somebody because you don’t want to get hurt, because you’ve been hurt yourself, and you take it all back, what you said, you take it back and you really love me as much as I love you? How about that, huh?”
She looks at him, her throat burning from the smoke and terror. She is so thirsty. Tired and thirsty and confused and scared. “What makes you think I’ve been hurt?”
“Just a lucky guess.”
She looks at him. Anger tightens in her belly like a fist. “You don’t even know me.”
He looks down at her, his eyes wide and stung. “Are you shittin’ me?”
“We hooked up—what?—barely two months ago. Bunch of people scared out of their wits. Nobody knows anybody. We’re all just … making do.”
“You gotta be kidding me. All we been through? And I don’t even know you?”
“Josh, that’s not what I—”
“You’re putting me on the same level as Bob and the stoner? Megan and them folks at the camp? Bingham?”
“Josh—”
“All them things you said to me this week—what are you saying?—you been lying? You said them things just to make me feel better?”
“I meant what I said,” she murmurs softly. The guilt twists in her. For a brief instant she thinks back to that terrible moment she lost little Sarah Bingham, the undead swarming all over the little girl on those godforsaken grounds outside the circus tent. The helplessness. The paralytic terror that seized Lilly that day. The loss and the grief and the sorrow as deep as a well. The fact is, Josh is correct. Lilly has said things to him in the throes of late-night lovemaking that aren’t exactly true. On some level she loves him, cares for him, has strong feelings … but she’s projecting something sick deep within her, something that has to do with fear.