The Walking Dead (2 page)

Six bodies lie akimbo in bloody heaps. Ages and genders are obscured by the wet carnage, the mottled, livid skin tones, and the misshapen skulls. The largest lies in a spreading pool of bile at the foot of the great circular staircase. Another one, perhaps the lady of the house, perhaps once a convivial hostess offering peach cobbler and Southern hospitality, is now splayed across the lovely white parquet floor in a contorted mess, a stringer of wormy gray matter flagging from her breached cranium.

Brian Blake feels his gorge rising, his throat involuntarily dilating.

“Okay, gentlemen, we got our work cut out for us,” Philip is saying, addressing his two cronies, Nick and Bobby, as well as his brother, but Brian can barely hear over the sick thump of his own heartbeat.

He sees the other remains—over the last two days, Philip has started calling the ones they destroy “twice-cooked pork”—strewn along the dark, burnished baseboards at the threshold of the living room. Maybe the teenage children who once lived here, maybe visitors who suffered the Southern
in
hospitality of an infected bite, these bodies lie in sunbursts of arterial spray. One of them, his or her dented head lying facedown like a spilled soup pan, still pumps its scarlet fluids across the floor with the profusion of a breached fire hydrant. A couple of others still have small hatchet blades embedded in their crania, sunk down to the hilt, like the flags of explorers triumphantly stuck into once unattainable summits.

Brian’s hand flies up to his mouth, as if he might stem the tide rising up his esophagus. He feels a tapping sensation on the top of his skull, as though a moth is ticking against his scalp. He looks up.

Blood drips from the overhead chandelier, a droplet landing on Brian’s nose.

“Nick, why don’t you go grab some of them tarps we saw earlier in the—”

Brian falls to his knees, hunches forward, and roars vomit across the parquet. The steaming flood of khaki-colored bile sluices across the tiles, mingling with the spoor of the fallen dead.

Tears burn Brian’s eyes as he heaves four days of soul-sickness onto the floor.

*   *   *

Philip Blake lets out a tense sigh, the buzz of adrenaline still coursing through him. For a moment he makes no effort to go to his brother’s side, but simply stands there, setting down his bloody axe, rolling his eyes. It’s a miracle Philip doesn’t have a groove worn into the tops of his eye sockets from all the eye rolling he’s done over the years on his brother’s account. But what else is Philip supposed to do? The poor son of bitch is family, and family is family … especially in off-the-scale times such as these.

The resemblance is sure there—nothing Philip can do about
that.
A tall, rangy, sinewy man with the ropy muscles of a tradesman, Philip Blake shares the same dark features as his brother, the same dark almond eyes and coal-black hair of their Mexican-American mother. Mama Rose’s maiden name was Garcia, and her features had dominated the lineage over those of the boys’ father, a big, coarse alcoholic of Scots-Irish descent named Ed Blake. But Philip, three years younger than Brian, had gotten all the muscle.

He now stands over six feet tall in his faded jeans, work boots, and chambray shirt, with the Fu Manchu mustache and jailhouse tats of a biker; and he is about to move his imposing figure over to his retching brother, and maybe say something harsh, when he stops himself. He hears something he doesn’t like coming from across the vestibule.

Bobby Marsh, an old high school pal of Philip’s, stands near the base of the staircase, wiping an axe blade on his size XXL jeans. A portly thirty-two-year-old junior college dropout, his long greasy brown hair pulled back in a rattail, Bobby Marsh is not exactly obese, but definitely overweight, definitely the type of guy his Burke County High classmates would call a butterball. He now giggles with nervous, edgy, belly-shivering laughter as he watches Brian Blake vomit. The giggling is colorless and hollow—a sort of tic that Bobby cannot seem to control.

The anxious giggling had started three days ago when one of the first of the undead had lumbered out of a service bay at a gas station near the Augusta airport. Clad in blood-soaked overalls, the grease monkey shuffled out of hiding with a trail of toilet paper on his heel, and the thing had tried to make a meal out of Bobby’s fat neck before Philip had stepped in and clobbered the thing with a crowbar.

The discovery that day—that a major blow to the head does the job quite nicely—had led to more nervous chortling on Bobby’s part—definitely a defense mechanism—with a lot of anxious chatter about it being “something in the water, man, like the black-fucking-plague.” But Philip didn’t want to hear about reasons for this shit storm then, and he sure doesn’t want to hear about them now.

“Hey!” Philip addresses the heavyset man. “You still think this is
funny
?”

Bobby’s laughter dies.

On the other side of the room, near a window overlooking the dark expanse of a backyard, which is currently shrouded in night, a fourth figure watches uneasily. Nick Parsons, another friend from Philip’s wayward childhood, is a compact, lean thirty-something with the kind of prep-school grooming and marine-cut hair of an eternal jock. The religious one of the bunch, Nick has taken the longest to get used to the idea of destroying things that were once human. Now his khakis and sneakers are stippled with blood, and his eyes burn with trauma, as he watches Philip approach Bobby.

“Sorry, man,” Bobby mutters.

“My daughter’s in there,” Philip says, coming nose to nose with Marsh. The volatile chemicals of rage and panic and pain can instantly ignite in Philip Blake.

Bobby looks at the blood-slicked floor. “Sorry, sorry.”

“Go get the tarps, Bobby.”

Six feet away, Brian Blake, still on his hands and knees, expels the last of his stomach contents, and continues to dry-heave.

Philip goes over to his older brother, kneels by him. “Let it out.”

“I’m—uh—” Brian croaks, sniffing, trying to form a complete thought.

Philip gently lays a big, grimy, callused hand on his brother’s hunched shoulders. “It’s okay, bro … just let it all out.”

“I’m—s-sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

Brian gets himself under control, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Y-you think you got all of them?”

“I do.”

“You sure?”

“Yep.”

“You searched … everywhere? In the basement and stuff?”

“Yes, sir, we did. All the bedrooms … even the attic. Last one came out of hiding at the sound of that fucking cough, loud enough to wake the fucking dead. Teenage girl, tried to have one of Bobby’s chins for lunch.”

Brian gulps down a raw, painful swallow. “These people … they …
lived
here.”

Philip sighs. “Not anymore.”

Brian manages to look around the room, then gazes up at his brother. Brian’s face is wet with tears. “But they were like … a family.”

Philip nods, and he doesn’t say anything. He feels like giving his brother a shrug—
so fucking what
—but all he does is keep nodding. He’s not thinking about the zombified family he just dispatched, or the implications of all the mind-numbing butchery he’s already wreaked over the last three days—slaughtering individuals who were recently soccer moms and mailmen and gas station attendants. Yesterday, Brian had gone off on some bullshit intellectual tangent about the difference between morals and ethics in this situation: Morally, one should never kill,
ever,
but ethically, which is subtly different, one should maintain the policy of killing only if it’s in self-defense. But Philip doesn’t see what they’re doing as killing. You can’t kill a thing that’s already been killed. What you do is squash it like a bug, and move on, and stop
thinking
so much.

The fact is, right now, Philip isn’t even thinking about the next move his little ragtag group will make—which is probably going to be entirely up to him (he has become the de facto leader of this bunch, and he might as well face it). Right now, Philip Blake is focused on a single objective: Since the nightmare started less than seventy-two hours ago, and folks started turning—for reasons nobody has yet been able to figure out—all that Philip Blake has been able to think about is protecting Penny. It is why he got the hell out of his hometown, Waynesboro, two days ago.

A small farming community on the eastern edge of central Georgia, the place had gone to hell quickly when folks had started dying and coming back. But it was Penny’s safety that had ultimately convinced Philip to fly the coop. It was because of Penny he had enlisted the help of his old high school buddies; and it was because of Penny he had set out for Atlanta, where, according to the news, refugee centers were being set up. It was all because of Penny. Penny is all that Philip Blake has left. She is the only thing keeping him going—the only salve on his wounded soul.

Long before this inexplicable epidemic had broken out, the void in Philip’s heart would pang at 3
A.M
on sleepless nights. That’s the exact hour he had lost his wife—hard to believe it’s been nearly four years now—on a rain-slick highway south of Athens. Sarah had been visiting a friend at the University of Georgia, and she’d been drinking, and she lost control of her car on a winding road in Wilkes County.

From the moment he had identified the body, Philip knew he would never be the same. He had no qualms about doing the right thing—taking on two jobs to keep Penny fed and clothed and cared for—but he would never be the same. Maybe that’s why all this was happening. God’s little gag. When the locusts come, and the river runs red with blood, the guy with the most to lose gets to lead the pack.

“Doesn’t matter who they were,” Philip finally says to his brother. “Or
what
they were.”

“Yeah … I guess you’re right.” By this point, Brian has managed to sit up, cross-legged now, taking deep wheezing breaths. He watches Bobby and Nick across the room, unrolling large canvas tarps and shaking open garbage bags. They begin rolling corpses, still dripping, into the tarps.

“Only thing that matters is we got this place cleaned out now,” Philip says. “We can stay here tonight, and if we can score some gas in the morning, we can make it to Atlanta tomorrow.”

“Doesn’t make any sense, though,” Brian mutters now, glancing from corpse to corpse.

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at them.”

“What?” Philip glances over his shoulder at the gruesome remains of the matriarch being rolled up in a tarp. “What about ’em?”

“It’s just the family.”

“So?”

Brian coughs into his sleeve, then wipes his mouth. “What I’m saying is … you got the mother, the father, four teenage kids … and that’s like
it
.”

“Yeah, so what?”

Brian looks up at Philip. “So, how the hell does something like this happen? They all …
turned together
? Did one of them get bitten and bring it back inside?”

Philip thinks about it for a moment—after all, he’s still trying to figure out just exactly what is going on, too, how this madness works—but finally Philip gets tired of thinking about it and says, “C’mon, get off your lazy ass and help us.”

*   *   *

It takes them about an hour to get the place cleaned up. Penny stays in the closet for the duration of the process. Philip brings her a stuffed animal from one of the kid’s rooms, and tells her it won’t be long before she can come out. Brian mops the blood, coughing fitfully, while the other three men drag the canvas-covered corpses—two large and four smaller ones—out the back sliding doors and across the large cedar deck.

The late-September night sky above them is as clear and cold as a black ocean, a riot of stars shining down, taunting them with their impassive, cheerful twinkling. The breaths of the three men show in the darkness as they drag the bundles across dew-frosted planks. They carry pickaxes on their belts. Philip has a gun stuffed down the back of his belt. It’s an old .22 Ruger that he bought at a flea market years ago, but nobody wants to rouse the dead with the bark of gunfire right now. They can hear the telltale drone of walking dead on the wind—garbled moaning sounds, shuffling footsteps—coming from somewhere in the darkness of the neighboring yards.

It’s been an unusually nippy early autumn in Georgia, and tonight the mercury is supposed to dip into the lower forties, perhaps even the upper thirties. Or at least that’s what the local AM radio station claimed before it petered out in a gust of static. Up to this point in their journey, Philip and his crew have been monitoring TV, radio, and the Internet on Brian’s BlackBerry.

Amid the general chaos, the news reports have been assuring people that everything is just peachy-keen—your trusty government is in control of the situation—and this little bump in the road will be smoothed out in a matter of hours. Regular warnings chime in on civil defense frequencies, admonishing folks to stay indoors, and keep out of sparsely populated areas, and wash their hands frequently, and drink bottled water, and blah, blah, blah.

Of course, nobody has any answers. And maybe the most ominous sign of all is the increasing number of station failures. Thankfully, gas stations still have gas, grocery stores are still stocked, and electrical grids and stoplights and police stations and all the infrastructural paraphernalia of civilization seem to be hanging on.