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To Sheri Stearn, my constant reader and other mother, and to Diego for the mechanics of death and destruction
—Jay Bonansinga
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A very special thank-you to the man, Robert Kirkman, who never fails to pull magic out of his hat; to Andy Cohen, my career compass; to Brendan Deneen, my editor and best dude; to Christina MacDonald for the best line editing ever; and to David Alpert, who holds it all together. Also a huge thanks to Kemper Donovan, Nicole Sohl, Stephanie Hargadon, Denise Dorman, Tom Leavens, Jeff Siegel, and my boys, Joey and Bill Bonansinga. Last but not least, my undying love and gratitude to the woman who changed my life and made me a better writer and man, Jill Norton Brazel.
—Jay Bonansinga
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
I. The Gathering
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
II. Showtime
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Also by Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga
About the Authors
Copyright
PART 1
The Gathering
So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.
—John Dryden
ONE
Writhing in pain on the ground, Bruce Allan Cooper gasps and blinks and tries to catch his breath. He can hear the gurgling, feral growls of a half-dozen biters coming for him, moving in for a feeding. A voice in his brain screams at him: Move, you fucking idiot! You pussy! What are you doing?!
A big African American with an NBA forward’s physique, a shaved, missile-shaped head, and a grizzle of a goatee, he rolls across the scabrous earth, barely avoiding the clawing gray fingers and snapping jaws of an adult female biter with half a face.
He covers maybe five or six feet until a dagger of pain shoots down his side, radiating fire across his ribs, seizing him up in paralyzing agony. He lands on his back, still gripping his rusty fire ax. The pick head is caked in blood and human hair and the black, viscous bile that has come to be known among survivors as walker-droppings.
Momentarily thunderstruck, his ears ringing, one eye already closing up from the swelling of a broken nose, Bruce wears the tattered army fatigues and mud-caked jackboots of the unofficial Woodbury militia. He can see the Georgia sky above him—a low canopy of filthy dishwater-gray clouds, inclement and nasty for April—and it taunts him: You’re nothing but a bug down there, Brucey-boy, a maggot on the carcass of a dying earth, a parasite feeding off the scraps and ruins of a vanishing human race.
All at once the panorama of the sky above him is eclipsed by three alien faces—dark planets slowly blocking out the heavens—each one snarling stupidly, drunkenly, each pair of milky eyes geeked perpetually open. One of them, an obese adult male in a soiled hospital smock, drools black mucus-gunk that drips on Bruce’s cheek.
“GOD-DAMMMMMM!”
Bruce snaps out of his stupor, finding an unexpected reserve of strength. He lashes out with his ax. The pointed end arcs upward and impales the fat biter in the soft tissue under the jaw. The lower half of the thing’s face detaches and jettisons, a gristly phalanx of dead flesh and glistening cartilage pinwheeling upwards of twenty feet in the air before coming back down to earth with a splat.
Rolling again, scrambling to his feet, Bruce executes a one-eighty spin—fairly graceful for a big man in excruciating pain—and hacks through the putrid neck muscles of another female biter coming at him. The head falls to the side, wobbling for a moment on threads of desiccated tissue before breaking free and tumbling to the ground.
The head rolls for a few feet, leaving a leech trail of black spoor, while the body remains upright for an agonizing moment, twitching with insensate arms outstretched in horrible blind instinct. Something metallic lies coiled at the thing’s feet as it finally sinks to the ground.
Bruce then hears the strangest thing that can be heard—muffled in his traumatized ears—following in the wake of the carnage: cymbals crashing. At least, that’s what it sounds like to Bruce’s ringing ears—a throbbing, metallic crashing noise in his brain—coming from the near distance. Backing away with his weapon at his side, spurred on by the sound, Bruce blinks and tries to focus on other biters shambling toward him. There are too many of them to engage with the pickax.
Bruce turns to flee, and without warning runs directly into another figure blocking his path.
“WHOA!”
The other figure—a thick-necked white man built like a fireplug, his sandy hair cut in an old-school flattop—lets out a war cry and swings a mace the size of a horse leg at Bruce. The spiked club whizzes past Bruce’s face, passing within centimeters of his broken nose. Bruce instinctively rears backward, tripping over his own feet.
He topples to the ground in an awkward display that sends up a cloud of dust and elicits another series of cymbal crashes from the hazy middle distance. The ax goes flying. The sandy-haired man takes advantage of the confusion and roars toward Bruce, the mace poised for action. Bruce grunts and rolls out of range at the last minute.
The mace head slams down hard, stick-pinning into the earth mere inches from Bruce’s head.
Bruce rolls toward the fallen weapon that lies in the red dirt about ten feet away. He gets his hand around the wooden shank, when suddenly, without warning, a figure lurches out of the haze to Bruce’s immediate left. Bruce jerks away from the biter, which is crawling toward him with the languid twitches of a giant lizard. Black ooze issues from the female’s slack mouth—its sharp little teeth visible—its jaw snapping with reptilian vigor.
Then something else happens that brings Bruce back to reality.
The chain holding the female in place suddenly clangs, the monster reaching the limits of its bondage. Bruce lets out an instinctive gasp of relief, the dead thing only inches away, flailing impotently at him. The biter growls with inchoate frustration, the chain holding fast. Bruce feels like digging the thing’s eyeballs out with his bare hands, like chewing through the neck of this useless piece of rotting shit-flesh.
Again, Bruce hears that weird cymbal-crashing noise, as well as the voice of the other man, barely audible under the noise: “C’mon, man, get up … get up.”
Bruce gets moving. He grabs the ax and struggles to his feet. More cymbal-crashing noises … as Bruce spins, and then swings the ax hard at the other man.
The blade barely misses Flattop’s throat, slicing through the collar of the man’s turtleneck sweater, leaving a six-inch gouge.
“How’s that?” Bruce mutters under his breath, circling the man. “That entertaining enough for ya?”
“That’s the spirit,” the stocky man murmurs—his name is Gabriel Harris, Gabe to his cronies—as he swings the club again, th
e nail-studded head whispering past Bruce’s swollen face.
“That all you got?” Bruce mumbles, jerking away just in time, and then circling around the other way. He lashes out with the ax. Gabe parries with the club, and all around the two combatants, the monsters keep growling and gurgling their watery ululations, straining against their chains, hungry for human flesh, stirred into a feeding frenzy.
As the dusty haze on the periphery of the battlefield clears, the remnants of an outdoor dirt-track arena come into focus.
* * *
The size of a football field, the outer edges lined with cyclone fencing, the Woodbury Veterans Speedway is surrounded by the relics of old pit areas and dark cavernous passageways. Behind the chain link rise latticed bench seats, sloping up to huge, rusted-out light stanchions. The stands are now filled with scores of cheering Woodbury residents. The cymbal-crashing sounds are, in fact, the wild applause and jeering voices of the crowd.
Out in the miasma of dust swirling around the infield, the gladiator known as Gabe mutters under his breath so only his adversary can hear, “You’re fighting like a goddamn girl today, Brucey”—the wisecrack punctuated by a roundhouse swing of the club at the black man’s legs.
Bruce vaults into the air, executing a dodge that would be the envy of a World Wrestling Entertainment star. Gabe swings again and the club goes wide and strikes the head of a young male biter in ragged, greasy dungarees, a former mechanic perhaps.
The nails embed themselves in the thing’s cadaverous skull, sending ropy strands of dark fluid into the air, before Gabe has a chance to dig the mace out and mumble, “Governor’s gonna be pissed with your bullshit performance.”
“Oh yeah?” Bruce counterstrikes with the handle of the ax, slamming it into Gabe’s solar plexus, driving the stocky man to the ground. The ax arcs through the air and comes down within centimeters of Gabe’s cheek.
Gabe rolls away and springs to his feet, still muttering under his breath. “Shouldn’t have had that extra serving of cornbread last night.”
Bruce moves in for another swing of the ax, whizzing the blade past Gabe’s neck. “You should talk, fat boy.”
Gabe swings the mace again and again, driving Bruce back toward the chained biters. “How many times have I told ya? Governor wants it to look real.”
Bruce blocks the onslaught of mace blows with the ax handle. “You broke my fucking nose, motherfucker.”
“Stop your bellyaching, dickweed.” Gabe slams the mace down again and again until the nails stick into the ax handle. Gabe pulls the mace back and wrenches the ax out of Bruce’s grip. The ax goes flying. The crowd cheers. Bruce dives away. Gabe goes after him. Bruce cuts and runs the other way, and Gabe lunges while simultaneously swinging the mace under the black man’s legs.
The nails catch Bruce’s fatigue pants, tearing a swath and superficially lacerating flesh. Bruce stumbles and goes down hard. Thin tendrils of blood loop across the pale, dusty daylight as Bruce rolls.
Gabe soaks up the frenzied, frantic applause—the clapping is almost hysterical—and he turns toward the bleachers, which are filled with the bulk of Woodbury’s post-plague population. He raises his mace Braveheart-style. The cheers swell and rise. Gabe milks it. He turns slowly with the mace over his head, an almost comical look of macho victory on his face.
The place erupts into pandemonium … and up in the stands, amid the waving arms and whooping voices, all but one onlooker seems transported by the spectacle.
* * *
Sitting in the fifth row, way off on the north end of the bleachers, Lilly Caul turns away in disgust. A faded linen scarf wound tightly around her swanlike neck to ward off the April chill, she is dressed in her customary ripped jeans, thrift-shop sweater, and hand-me-down beads. As she shakes her head and lets out an exasperated sigh, the wind blows tendrils of her toffee-brown hair around her once-youthful face, which now bears the lines of trauma—the wrinkles nested around her aquamarine eyes and along the edges of her mouth—as deep as the grain in burnished cowhide. She isn’t even aware that she’s mumbling under her breath, “Fucking Roman circuses…”
“What was that?” The woman next to her glances up from an insulated cup of tepid green tea. “Did you say something?”
Lilly shakes her head. “No.”
“You okay?”
“Fine … just peachy.” Lilly keeps gazing off into the distance as the rest of the crowd yelps and hollers and emits hyena howls. Still only in her early thirties, Lilly Caul looks at least ten years older than that now, her brow perpetually furrowed in consternation. “You want to know the truth, I don’t know how much more of this shit I can take.”
The other woman sips her tea thoughtfully. Clad in a dull-white lab coat under her parka, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, she’s the town nurse—an earnest, soft-spoken girl named Alice—who has taken a keen interest in Lilly’s tenuous place in the town’s hierarchy. “It’s none of my business,” Alice says finally, speaking softly enough to go unheard by any nearby revelers, “but if I were you, I would keep my feelings to myself.”
Lilly looks at her. “What are you talking about?”
“For the time being, at least.”
“I’m not following.”
Alice seems vaguely uncomfortable talking about this in broad daylight, in plain sight of the others. “He’s watching us, you know.”
“What?”
“Right now, he’s keeping tabs.”
“You gotta be—”
Lilly stops herself. She realizes that Alice is referring to the shadowy figure standing in the mouth of the vaulted stone passageway directly to the north, about thirty yards away, under the defunct scoreboard. Draped in shadow, silhouetted by the cage lights behind him, the man stands with hands on his hips, watching the action on the infield with a satisfied gleam in his eyes.
Of average height and build, clad in black, he has a large-caliber pistol holstered on his hip. At first glance, he appears almost harmless, benign, like a proud land baron or medieval noble surveying his manor. But even at this distance, Lilly can sense his serpentine gaze—as cunning as a cobra’s—scanning every corner of the stands. And every few seconds, that electric gaze falls on the spot at which Lilly and Alice now sit shivering in the spring winds.
“Better if he believes everything is just fine,” Alice murmurs into her tea.
“Jesus Christ,” Lilly mutters, staring down at the littered cement floor beneath the bleacher seats. Another surge of cheers and applause rises up around her as the gladiators go at it some more on the infield, Bruce going postal with his ax, Gabe getting boxed in by a cluster of chained biters. Lilly pays little attention to it.
“Smile, Lilly.”
“You smile.… I don’t have the stomach for it.” Lilly looks up at the grisly action on the field for a moment, the mace tearing through the rotten craniums of the living dead. “I just don’t get it.” She shakes her head and looks away.
“Don’t get what?”
Lilly takes a deep breath and looks at Alice. “What about Stevens?”
Alice gives her a shrug. Dr. Stevens has been Alice’s lifeline for almost a year now, keeping her sane, teaching her the nursing trade, and showing her how to patch up battered gladiators with the dwindling storehouse of medical supplies stored in the network of catacombs beneath the arena. “What about him?”
“I don’t see him playing along with this hideous shit.” Lilly rubs her face. “What makes him so special—that he doesn’t have to play nice with the Governor? Especially after what happened in January.”
“Lilly—”
“C’mon, Alice.” Lilly looks at her. “Admit it. The good doctor never shows up at these things, and he’s constantly grumbling about the Governor’s bloodthirsty freak shows to anyone who’ll listen.”
Alice licks her lips, turns, and puts a warning hand on Lilly’s arm. “Listen to me. Don’t kid yourself. The only reason Dr. Stevens is tolerated is because of his medical skills.?
??
“So?”
“So he’s not exactly a welcome part of the Governor’s little kingdom.”
“What are you saying, Alice?”
The younger woman takes another deep breath, and then lowers her voice even further. “All I’m saying is, nobody’s immune. Nobody’s got job security around here.” She tightens her grip on Lilly’s arm. “What if they find another doctor, one who’s a little more gung ho? Stevens could very easily end up out there.”
Lilly pulls herself away from the nurse, rises to her feet, and glances out at the ghastly action on the infield. “I’m so done with this, I can’t take it anymore.” She shoots a glance at the figure silhouetted in the shadow-bound cloister to the north. “I don’t care if he’s watching.”
Lilly starts toward the exit.
Alice grabs her. “Lilly, just promise me … you’ll be careful. Okay? Keep your head down? As a favor to me?”
Lilly gives her a cold, enigmatic little smile. “I know what I’m doing, Alice.”
Then, Lilly turns, descends the stairs, and vanishes out the exit.
* * *
It’s been over two years since the first of the dead reanimated and made themselves known to the living. In that time, the larger world outside the rural backwaters of Georgia gradually winked out with the slow certainty of metastasizing cells, the pockets of survivors groping for purchase in abandoned office parks, deserted retail outlets, and derelict communities. As the walker population incubated and multiplied, and the dangers increased, tribal alliances among humans formed themselves in earnest.
The township of Woodbury, Georgia, in the county of Meriwether, situated in the western part of the state, about seventy miles south of Atlanta, has become a virtual anomaly in the realm of survivor settlements. Originally a small farming village of about a thousand people, spanning a six-block stretch of main drag and railroad crossings, the town has been completely fortified and buttressed by the makeshift matériel of war.
Semitrucks retrofitted with fifty-caliber machine gun placements have been canted across the outer corners. Old railroad cars have been wrapped in concertina wire and positioned to block points of egress. Down through the center of town, walled ramparts surround the central business district—some of the barricades just recently completed—within which people live their forlorn lives clinging to memories of church socials and outdoor barbeques.