The Walking Dead (10 page)

“He’ll be right back, kiddo,” Brian says to the kid. He aches for her. This is not right, a child going through this, but on some level Brian knows how she feels. “He’s a tough old boy, Philip. He can beat the crap outta any monster comes along, believe me.”

From the front seat Nick turns and says, “Listen to your uncle, sweetie. He’s right. Your daddy can take care of himself and then some.”

“I saw your daddy catch a rabid dog once,” Brian says. “He was maybe nineteen, and there was this German shepherd terrorizing the neighbor kids.”

“I remember that,” Nick says.

“Your daddy chased that thing—foaming mouth and all—down to the dry creek bed, and he wrestled the damn thing into a trash barrel.”

“I totally remember that,” Nick says. “Grabbed it with his bare hands, threw it halfway across the gully before slamming the trash can down on it like he was catching a fly.”

Brian reaches down and tenderly brushes a strand of hair from the little girl’s face. “He’ll be okay, honey … trust me. He’s a mean
muchacho.
”

Outside the vehicle, a piece of burning wreckage falls to the ground. The clatter makes everybody jump. Nick looks at Brian. “Hey, man … you mind reaching back into that zipper bag by the wheel well?”

Brian looks at Nick. “What do you need?”

“One of them goose guns.”

Brian stares at him a moment, then turns and leans over the back headrest. He roots out the long, canvas hunting bag wedged between a cooler and a backpack. He unzips it and finds one of the Marlin 55s.

Handing the shotgun across the backseat to Nick in the front, Brian says, “You need the shells, too?”

“I think it’s already loaded,” Nick says, hinging open the barrel and peering down into the breech.

Brian can tell Nick is handy with the thing, has probably hunted before, although Brian never witnessed it. Brian had never been the type to participate in the manly pursuits of his younger brother and his cronies, although he secretly yearned to do just that. “Two shells in the breech,” Nick says, snapping the barrel shut.

“Just be careful with that thing,” Brian says.

“Used to hunt feral hogs with one of these babies,” Nick says, cocking and locking it.

“Hogs?”

“Yep … wild hogs … up to Chattahoochee reservation. Used to go on night hunts with my dad and my uncle Verne.”

“Pigs you’re talking about,” Brian says incredulously.

“Yeah, basically. A hog is just a big ol’ pig. Maybe they’re older, too, I’m not—”

Another loud metallic crash comes from outside Nick’s window.

Nick jerks the barrel toward the noise, finger on the trigger, his teeth gnashing with nervous tension. Nothing moves outside the passenger window. Muscles uncoil inside the Suburban, a long sigh of relief from Nick. Brian starts to say, “We gotta get our butts in gear before—”

Another noise.

This time it comes from the driver’s side, a shuffling of feet—

—and before Nick can even register the identity of the shadowy figure approaching the Suburban’s driver-side window, he swings the Marlin’s muzzle up at the window, takes aim, and is about to squeeze off a couple of twenty-gauge greetings, when a familiar voice booms outside the car.

“JESUS CHRIST!”

Philip is visible outside the window just for an instant, before ducking out of the line of fire.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nick says, instantly recognizing his mistake.

Philip’s voice outside the window is lower now, more controlled, but still seething with anger. “You want to point that thing away from the goddamn window?”

Nick lowers the barrel. “I’m sorry, Philly, my bad, I’m sorry.”

The door clicks and Philip slips back into the car, breathing hard, his face shiny with sweat. He shuts his door and lets out a long breath. “Nick—”

“Philly, I’m sorry … I’m a little jumpy.”

For a moment Philip looks like he’s going to take the other man’s head off, then the anger fades. “We’re all a little jumpy … I get that.”

“I’m totally sorry.”

“Just pay attention.”

“I will, I will.”

Brian speaks up. “What did you find out there?”

Philip reaches up to the stick shift. “A way around this damn mess.” He flips it into four-wheel drive and slams the lever down. “Everybody hold on.”

*   *   *

He turns the wheel, and they slowly roll across a spray of broken glass. The shards crunch under the Suburban’s massive wheels, and nobody says anything, but Brian’s thinking about the potential for flat tires.

Philip steers the vehicle down across the center median—which is a shallow culvert overgrown with switchgrass, weeds, and cattails—and the rear wheels dig into the rutted earth. As they approach the other side, Philip gives it a little more juice, and the Suburban lurches upward and across the eastbound lanes.

Philip keeps his hands glued to the steering wheel as they approach the far shoulder. “Hold on!” he calls out, as they suddenly plunge down a slope of muddy weeds.

The Suburban pitches sideways like a sinking ship. Brian holds on to Penny, and Nick holds on to the center armrest. Yanking the wheel, Philip kicks the accelerator.

The vehicle fishtails toward a narrow gap in the wreckage. Tree branches scrape the side of the SUV. The rear wheels slide sideways, then chew into the mud. Philip wrestles the wheel. Everybody else holds their respective breaths, as the Suburban scrapes through the opening.

When the car emerges out the other side, a spontaneous cheer rings out. Nick slaps Philip on the back, and Brian whoops and hollers triumphantly. Even Penny seems to lighten up a little, the hint of a smile tugging at the corners of her tulip-shaped lips.

Through the windshield they can see the tangle of vehicles in the darkness ahead of them—at least twenty cars, SUVs, and light trucks in the westbound lanes—most of them damaged in the pileup. All of them abandoned, many of them burned-out shells. The empty vehicles stretch back at least a hundred yards.

Philip puts the pedal to the metal, muscling the SUV back toward the road. He jerks the wheel. The rear of the SUV wags and churns.

Something is wrong. Brian feels the loss of traction beneath them like a buzzing in his spine, the engine revving suddenly.

The cheering dies.

The car is stuck.

*   *   *

For a moment Philip keeps the pedal to the floor, urging the thing forward with his ass cheeks, as if his sheer force of will and white-hot rage—and the tightening of his sphincter muscles—can get the blasted thing to move. But the Suburban keeps drifting sideways. Soon the thing is simply spinning all four wheels, kicking up twin gushers of mud out the back into the moonlit darkness behind them.

“FUCK!—FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Philip slams a fist down on the steering wheel, hard enough to make the thing crack and send a splinter of pain up his arm. He practically shoves the foot feed through the floor, the engine screaming.

“Let up on it, man!” Nick hollers over the noise. “It’s just digging us in deeper!”

“FUCK!”

Philip lets up on the gas.

The engine winds down, the Suburban leaning to one side, a foundering boat in brackish waters.

“We gotta push it out,” Brian says after a moment of tense silence.

“Take the wheel,” Philip says to Nick, opening his door and slipping outside. “Give it gas when I tell ya to. Come on, Brian.”

Brian opens the rear door, slips outside, and joins his brother in the glow of the taillights.

The rear tires have sunk at least six inches into the greasy muck, each rear quarter panel spattered with mud. The front wheels are no better. Philip places his big, gnarled hands on the wood grain of the tailgate, and Brian moves to the other side, assuming a wide stance in order to get a better purchase in the mud.

Neither of them notices the dark figures lumbering out of the trees on the other side of the highway.

“Okay, Nick, now!” Philip calls out and shoves with all his might.

The engine growls.

The wheels churn, spewing fountains of mud, as the Blake brothers push and push. They push with everything they have, all to no avail, as the slow-moving figures behind them shamble closer.

“Again!” Philip shouts, putting all his weight behind the shoving.

The rear wheels spin, sinking deeper into the mire, as Brian gets sprayed with an aerosol of mud.

Behind him, moving through a fog bank of smoke and shadows, the uninvited close the distance to about fifty yards, crunching through broken glass with the slow, lazy, awkward movements of injured lizards.

“Get back in the car, Brian.” Philip’s voice has abruptly changed, becoming low and even. “Right now.”

“What is it?”

“Just do it.” Philip is opening the rear hatch. Hinges squeak as he reaches in and fishes for something. “Don’t ask any questions.”

“But what about—” Brian’s words stick in his throat as he catches a glimpse in his peripheral vision of at least a dozen dark figures—maybe more—closing in on them from several directions.

SIX

The figures approach from across the median, and from behind the flaming debris of the wreck, and from the adjacent woods—all shapes and sizes, faces the color of spackling compound, eyes gleaming like marbles in the firelight. Some are burned. Some are in tatters. Some are so well dressed and groomed they look as though they just came from church. Most have that curled-lip, exposed-incisor look of insatiable hunger.

“Shit.” Brian looks at his brother. “What are you gonna do? What are you thinking?”

“Get your ass in the car, Brian.”

“Shit—shit!” Brian hurries around to the side door, throws it open, and climbs in next to Penny, who is looking around with a bewildered expression. Brian slams the door, and smashes down the lock. “Lock the doors, Nick.”

“I’m gonna help him—” Nick goes for his goose gun and opens his door, but he stops abruptly when he hears the strange sound of Philip’s flat, cold, metallic tone through the open rear hatch.

“I got this. Do what he says, Nick. Lock the doors and stay down.”

“There’s too many of them!” Nick is thumbing the hammers on the Marlin, already with his right leg out the door, his work boot on the pavement.

“Stay in the car, Nick.” Philip is digging out a pair of matched log splitters. A few days ago he found the small axes in a garden shed of a mansion at Wiltshire Estates—two matched, balanced implements of razor-sharp carbon steel—and at the time he wondered what in the world some fat rich guy (who probably paid a yard service to split his firewood) would want a pair of small bad-axes for.

In the front seat, Nick pulls his leg back inside the SUV, slams his door, and bangs the lock down. He twists around with his eyes blazing and the gun cradled in his arms. “What the hell? What are you doing, Philly?”

The rear hatch slams.

The silence crashes down on the interior.

Brian looks down at the child. “I’m thinking maybe you ought to get down on the floor, kiddo.”

Penny says nothing as she slides down the front of the seat, and then curls into a fetal position. Something in her expression, some glint of knowing in her big soft eyes, reaches out to Brian and puts the squeeze on his heart. He pats her shoulder. “We’ll get through this.”

Brian turns and peers over the backseat, over the cargo and out through the rear window.

Philip has a bad-axe in either hand, and is calmly walking toward the converging crowd of zombies. “Jesus,” Brian utters under his breath.

“What’s he doing, Brian?” Nick’s voice is high and taut, his hands fingering the Marlin’s bolt.

Brian cannot muster a response because he is now held rapt by the terrible sight through the window.

*   *   *

It’s not pretty. It’s not graceful or cool or heroic or manly or even well executed … but it feels good. “I got this,” Philip says to himself, under his breath, as he lashes out at the closest one, a heavyset man in farmer’s dungarees.

The bad-axe sheers off a grapefruit-sized lobe of the fat one’s skull, sending a geyser of pink matter into the night air. The zombie falls. But Philip doesn’t stop. Before the next closest one can reach him, Philip goes to work on the big flaccid body on the ground, windmilling the cold steel in each hand down on the dead flesh. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Blood and tissue fountain. Sparks kick off the pavement with each blow.

“I got this, I got this, I got this,” Philip murmurs to no one in particular, letting all the pent-up rage and sorrow come out in a flurry of glancing blows. “I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this, I got this—”

By this point others have closed in—a skinny young man with black fluid dripping off his lips, a fat woman with a bloated, dead face, a guy in a bloody suit—and Philip spins away from the mangled corpse on the ground to go to work on the others. He grunts with each blow—
I GOT THIS!
—cleaving skulls—
I GOT THIS!
—severing carotid arteries—
I GOT THIS!
—letting his anger drive the cold steel through cartilage and bone and nasal cavities—
I GOT THIS!
—the blood and brain matter misting up across his face as he remembers the foaming mouth of rabid fangs coming for him when he was a kid, and God taking his wife Sarah, and the monsters taking his best friend Bobby Marsh—
I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!—I GOT THIS!!