Authors: Jay Bonansinga,Robert Kirkman
Philip exhales a pained sigh. “All right, you fellas know the drill … grab your shit, I’ll get Penny.”
* * *
They light out with Penny on the leash, their backs laden with supplies. They hug the shoulder, following the highway. Brian limps along without complaint, despite the stabbing pain in his hip. Around Greenville, they have to take a detour due to an inexplicable pileup of wrecked vehicles, the scorched tangle of metal spanning across both northbound and southbound lanes, the area crawling with zombies. From a distance, it looks as though the earth itself has split open and vomited up hundreds of walking corpses.
They decide to take a two-lane—Rural Route 100—which wends its way southward, through Greenville, and around the congestion. And they get maybe a mile or two before Philip puts his hand up and stops.
“Hold on a second,” he says, frowning. He cocks his head. “What is that?”
“What is
what
?”
“That noise.”
“What noise?”
Philip listens. They all listen. Philip turns in a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the direction from which the sound is coming. “Is that an engine?”
Brian hears it now. “Sounds like a fucking tank.”
“Or maybe a bulldozer,” Nick ventures.
“What the fuck.” Philip narrows his eyes as he listens. “That can’t be too far away.”
They continue on. Less than a mile down the road, they come upon a dented sign:
WOODBURY—1 MI.
* * *
They continue on down the road, all eyes on the smoke-clogged western sky.
“Whoever they are, they got fuel,” Nick says.
Brian sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. “You think they’re friendly?”
“I ain’t taking any chances,” Philip says. “C’mon … we’ll find a back way in, take it one step at a time.”
Philip leads them across the shoulder, then down a weedy slope.
They scuttle across an adjacent farm field, a vast and fallow valley of soft earth. Their boots sink into the mire as they go. The chill wind lashes at them, and it takes them an interminable amount of time to circumnavigate the outskirts before the remnants of an abandoned town begin to materialize ahead of them.
A Walmart sign rises above a stand of ancient live oaks. The golden arches of a McDonald’s are visible not far beyond the Walmart. Litter tumbles down empty streets, past postwar brick buildings and cookie-cutter condos. But on the north side of the town, within a maze of cyclone fences, the sounds of engines and hammering and the occasional voice reveal the presence of humans.
“Looks like they’re building a wall or somethin’,” Nick says as they pause under the cover of trees. In the distance, about two hundred yards away, a handful of figures labor over a tall wooden rampart closing off the north edge of town. The barricade already stretches nearly two blocks.
“Rest of the place looks dead,” Philip comments. “Can’t be many survivors.”
“What the hell is that?” Brian is pointing at a semicircle of high stanchions a few blocks west of the barricade. Clusters of arc lights point down at a large open space, obscured behind buildings and fences.
“Football field for the high school maybe?” Philip is reaching for his Glock. He pulls it out and checks the remaining rounds in the magazine. He’s got six hollow-points left.
“What are you thinking, Philip?” Nick looks anxious, jittery.
Brian wonders if Nick is worried about walking into another trap. Or maybe he’s just edgy around Philip. The truth is, Brian isn’t too keen on waltzing uninvited into this little ragtag community, especially considering the fact that they have a moldering zombie in tow, and a father of said zombie so tightly wound he seems capable of almost anything at any moment. But what choice do they have? Dark clouds are gathering on the western horizon again, and the temperature is plummeting.
“What do you got there, sport?” Philip nods toward the gun bulging out the side of Brian’s belt. “The .38?”
“Yeah.”
“And you got the .357?” Philip says to Nick, who nods nervously. “Okay … here’s what we’re gonna do.”
* * *
They enter from the northeast corner of town, from the trees along the railroad tracks. They come slowly, with their hands raised in a nonthreatening gesture. At first, they’re surprised by how far they get—in plain sight of at least a dozen humans—before anyone even notices strangers strolling into town.
“Hey!” A hefty, middle-aged man in a black turtleneck sweater hops off a bulldozer, pointing at the newcomers. “Bruce! Look! We got company!”
Another worker—a tall black man in a peacoat with a glistening shaved head—pauses his hammering. He looks up and his eyes widen. He goes for a shotgun leaning against a nearby cooler.
“Take it easy, fellas!” Philip approaches slowly across a dusty truck lot, his hands raised. His expression is an approximation of calm, as mild and friendly as he can muster. “Just passin’ through … not lookin’ for any drama.”
Brian and Nick follow closely on Philip’s heels, each with their hands up.
The two men come over with shotguns. “You boys packin’ heat?” the black man wants to know.
“The safety’s on,” Philip says, pausing to carefully reach for his Glock. “I’m gonna show you the piece, nice and easy like.”
He shows them the nine-millimeter.
“What about you two?” The man in the turtleneck addresses Brian and Nick.
They each show their guns.
“Is it just the three of ya?” The man wearing the turtleneck has a Northern accent. His close-cropped blond hair is peppered with gray, and he has a wrestler’s neck and a stevedore’s barrel chest. His big porcine belly hangs over his belt.
“Just us three,” Philip says, and it’s essentially the truth. He left Penny tied to a tree in the shadows of the hickory grove a hundred yards outside the barricade. Philip secured her with extra rope and put a bandana around her mouth so she wouldn’t make any noise. It killed him to gag her like that, but until he knows what he’s dealing with here, he figures it’s best to keep her out of sight.
“What happened to you?” the turtleneck guy says to Brian, nodding at his wounds.
“He had a bad time fightin’ off some Biters,” Philip explains.
The man in the turtleneck lowers his shotgun. “You boys from Atlanta?”
“No, sir. Little hole-in-the-wall called Waynesboro.”
“You seen any National Guard out there?”
“No, sir.”
“You been traveling on your own?”
“Pretty much.” Philip puts his gun back. “We just need to rest up and we’ll be on our way.”
“You got food?”
“Nope.”
“Any cigarettes?”
“No, sir.” Philip indicates his companions. “If we could just get a roof over our head for a short spell, we won’t bother anybody. You fellas okay with that?”
For a moment, the two workmen give each other a glance like they’re sharing a private joke. Then the black man bursts out laughing. “Boys, this is the wild fucking west … nobody gives two pieces of a rat’s ass
what
you do.”
* * *
It turns out that the black man was understating the situation in Woodbury.
Over the remaining hours of that day, Philip, Brian, and Nick get the lay of the land and it’s not exactly Mayberry RFD. There are about sixty inhabitants clinging to the secure sector on the north side of town, keeping to themselves mostly, eking out an existence on scraps, most of them so paranoid and mistrustful of each other that they rarely even come out of their private hovels. They live in deserted condos and empty stores, and they have no organized leadership whatsoever. It’s amazing that any of them had the initiative to begin building a wall. In Woodbury, it’s every man, woman, and child for themselves.
All of which suits Philip, Brian, and Nick just fine. After scouting the edges of town, they decide to hole up in an abandoned two-unit apartment building on the southern border of the safe zone, near the uninhabited commercial district. Somebody has moved school buses and empty semitrailers into rows around the periphery of town, forming a makeshift bastion to keep out the Biters.
For now, the place seems relatively safe.
* * *
That night, Brian can’t sleep, so he decides to sneak out and explore the town. Walking isn’t easy—his ribs are still bothering him, and his breathing is labored and wheezy—but it feels good to get out and clear his head.
In the diamond-chip moonlight, the sidewalks lie desolate and barren, threading through what was once a typical little blue-collar burg. Trash blows willy-nilly across deserted playgrounds and squares. Storefronts housing the requisite small-town merchants—the local dentist, DeForest’s Feed and Seed, a Dairy Queen, the Piggly Wiggly—are all dark and boarded. Evidence of the “turn” lies everywhere—in the lime pits at Kirney’s Salvage Yard, where bodies have been recently deposited and torched, and in the community gazebo at Robert E. Lee Square, where bloodstains from some gruesome battle still glisten like black tar in the moonlight.
Brian isn’t surprised to learn that the open field in the center of town—which he first glimpsed from the neighboring farm field—is an old dirt racetrack. Apparently, the residents have enough fuel to keep generators going around the clock; and as Brian soon discovers, every so often, in the dark of night, the huge arc lights over the racetrack flare on for no good reason. On the far side of the track, Brian passes a semitrailer pulsing like a great steel heart with the muffled vibrations of combustion engines—the cables snaking out the back and tying into neighboring buildings.
By the time dawn starts to glow on the eastern horizon, Brian decides he better head back to the two-flat. He crosses a deserted parking lot, and then takes a shortcut down a litter-strewn alley. He reaches the adjacent street and passes a group of old men huddled around a flaming trash barrel, warming their hands against the chill and passing around a bottle of Thunderbird.
“Watch your back, sonny,” one of the men says to Brian as he passes, and the two other men chuckle humorlessly. The three men are ancient, grizzled, spavined codgers in moth-eaten Salvation Army coats. They look like they’ve been hunkered around this barrel for eternity.
Brian pauses. He has the snub-nosed .38 pistol wedged behind his belt, under his jacket, but he feels no compulsion to brandish it. “Got Biters in the area?”
“Biters?” one of the other men says. This one has a long white beard and his wrinkled eyes narrow with confusion.
“He means them dead things,” says the third old derelict, the fattest of the three.
“Yeah, Charlie,” says the first old man. “You remember … them walkin’ pus bags that ate Yellow Mike … the reason we’re stuck in this shitheel town?”
“I know what he’s talkin’ about!” snaps the bearded codger. “Just never heard ’em called such a thing before.”
“You new in town, son?” The fat one is giving Brian the once-over.
“As a matter of fact, yeah … I am.”
The fat old man shows a grin full of rotten, green teeth. “Welcome to hell’s waiting room.”
“Don’t listen to him, son,” the first old man says, putting a bony, arthritic arm around Brian’s shoulder. Then, in a low, mucousy voice, the old guy says confidentially: “It ain’t the dead things you gotta be mindful of around here … it’s the living.”
* * *
The next day, Philip tells Brian and Nick to keep their mouths shut while they’re in Woodbury, stay under the radar, avoid any contact with other residents, refrain from even telling people their names. Thankfully, the apartment serves them well as a temporary refuge. Built in the 1950s, with furnishings at least that old—chipped mirror tile on one wall, a moth-eaten sleeper sofa in the living room, a huge rectangular fish tank next to the TV, brimming with scum and the tiny floating corpses of neglected goldfish—the place has three bedrooms and running water. It smells like rancid cat shit and rotting fish, but as Brian’s dad used to say, “Beggars can’t be choosers.” They find canned goods in the pantries of both apartments, and they decide to stay for a while.
Much to Brian’s amazement, the townspeople leave them alone, as though they are ghosts. Brian can tell that word has spread among the inhabitants of newcomers in their midst, but still, it’s as though the Blakes and Nick are apparitions haunting the broken-down apartment. Which is not too far from the truth. Nick keeps to himself and reads his Bible and doesn’t say much. Philip and Brian, still edgy around each other, also go about their business with minimal conversation. It doesn’t even occur to them to find a vehicle and continue on their southward journey. It feels to Brian like they’ve given up … on getting to the coast, on the future, maybe on each other.
Brian continues to heal, and Philip tends to his own obsession with Penny, stealing away to the hickory grove every chance he gets.
* * *
Late one night, Brian hears the apartment door clicking open and shut.
He lies there in bed, listening for nearly an hour, when finally he hears Philip returning in a flurry of shuffling steps and gurgling noises. This is the third night in a row Philip has silently slipped out of the apartment—presumably to check on Penny while the townspeople are asleep—but up until tonight, his return has been as quiet and discreet as his departure. But now Brian can hear Philip breathing heavily out in the living room, murmuring something that is drowned out by watery groaning sounds and the clank of a chain.