The Walking Dead (23 page)

April feels his forehead. “He’s ice-cold.”

“Is the oxygen running?”

“Full blast.”

“Daddy?” April gently repositions the old man so he’s lying supine with the oxygen tube across his upper lip. Again they give him little slaps. “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy, can you hear us? Daddy?”

The old man coughs, eyes fluttering. He blinks. He tries to get a good lungful of air, but his shallow breaths keep hitching in his throat. His eyes are rolled back in his head, and he appears to be only semiconscious.

“Daddy, look at me,” April says, her hand gently turning his face toward hers. “Can you see me?”

“Let’s get him on the bed,” Tara suggests. “Fellas, you mind giving us a hand?”

Philip, Nick, and Brian step into the room. Philip and Nick take one side of the old man, and Tara and Brian the other, and on the count of three, they carefully lift the old man off the floor and lay him on the bed, making the springs squeak and tangling the tube on one side.

Moments later, they have the tube clear and the old man covered in blankets. Only his pale, sunken face is visible above the linens, his eyes shut, his mouth lolled open, and his breathing coming in fits and starts. He sounds like a combustion engine that refuses to turn over. Every few moments, his eyelids flutter and something flickers behind them—lips stretched into a grimace—but then his face goes slack. He is still breathing … barely.

Tara and April sit on either side of the bed, stroking the lanky form under the blankets. For a long while, nobody says anything. But chances are, they’re all thinking the same thing.

*   *   *

“You think it’s a stroke?” Brian asks softly, minutes later, sitting out by the sliding glass doors.

“I don’t know, I don’t know.” April paces the living room, chewing her fingernails, while the others sit around the room, watching her. Tara is in the bedroom, at her father’s bedside. “Without medical attention, what chance does he have?”

“Has anything like this ever happened before?”

“He’s had trouble breathing before but nothin’ like this.” April stops pacing. “God, I knew this day was gonna come.” She wipes her eyes, which are moist with tears. “We’re on the last tank of oxygen.”

Philip asks about medication.

“We got his medicine, sure, but that ain’t gonna do him much good now. He needs a doctor. Stubborn old coot blew off his last appointment a month ago.”

“What do we have in the way of medical supplies?” Philip asks her.

“I don’t know, we got some shit from upstairs, antihistamines and shit.” April paces some more. “We got first-aid kits. Big deal. This is serious. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

“Let’s stay calm and think this thing through.” Philip wipes his mouth. “He’s resting peacefully now, right? His airways are clear. You never know, something like this … he could bounce back.”

“But what if he doesn’t?” She stops moving and looks at him. “What if he doesn’t bounce back?”

Philip gets up and goes over to her. “Listen. We gotta keep our heads clear.” He pats her shoulder. “We’ll keep a close watch on him, we’ll figure something out. He’s a tough old bird.”

“He’s a tough old bird who’s dying,” April says, a single tear tracking down her face.

“You don’t know that,” Philip says, wiping the tear from her cheek.

She looks at him. “Good try, Philip.”

“Come on.”

“Good try.” She looks away, her crestfallen expression as desolate as a death mask. “Good try.”

*   *   *

That night, the Chalmers girls sit watch at their father’s bedside, their chairs drawn up on either side of the bed, a battery-powered lantern painting the old man’s pallid face in pale light. The apartment is as cold as a meat locker. April can see Tara’s breath across the room.

The old man lies there for most of the night in stony repose, his hollow cheeks contracting periodically with his labored breathing. The grizzled whiskers of his chin look like metal filings, shifting in a magnetic field, moving occasionally with the tics of his stricken nervous system. Every once in a while his dry, cracked lips will begin to work impotently, trying to form a word. But other than little dry puffs of air, nothing comes out.

At some point in the wee hours, April notices that Tara has dozed off, her head down on the edge of the bed. April grabs a spare blanket and carefully drapes it over her sister. She hears a voice.

“Lil?”

It’s coming from the old man. His eyes are still closed, but his mouth is working furiously, his expression furrowed with anger. Lil is short for Lillian, David’s late wife. April hasn’t heard the nickname in years.

“Daddy, it’s April,” she whispers, touching his cheek. He recoils, his eyes still closed. His mouth is contorted, his voice slurred and drunken with nerve damage on one side of his face.

“Lil, get the dogs in! There’s a storm comin’—a big one—a nor’easter!”

“Daddy, wake up,” April whispers softly. Emotion wells up inside her.

“Lil, where are you?”

“Daddy?”

Silence.

“Daddy?”

At this point, Tara is sitting up, blinking, startled at the sound of her father’s strangled voice. “What’s going on?” she says, rubbing her eyes.

“Daddy?”

The silence continues, the old man’s breaths coming hard and fast now.

“Da—”

The word sticks in April’s throat as she sees something horrible crossing the old man’s face. His eyelids flick open to half-mast, the whites of his eyes showing, and he begins to speak in an alarmingly clear voice: “The devil has plans for us.”

In the gloomy half-light of the lantern, the two sisters exchange mortified glances.

The voice that comes out of David Chalmers is low and gravelly, an engine dieseling: “The day of reckoning is drawing near … the Deceiver walks among us.”

He falls silent, his head lolling to one side of the pillow as if the wires to his brain have been abruptly cut.

Tara checks his pulse.

She looks at her sister.

April looks at her father’s face, his expression now slackened and relaxed into a sanguine, tranquil mask of deep and endless sleep.

*   *   *

With the morning’s light, Philip stirs in his sleeping bag on the living room floor. He sits up and rubs his sore neck, his joints stiff from the cold. For a moment, he lets his eyes adjust to the gloomy light, and he orients himself to his surroundings. He sees Penny on the sofa, cocooned in blankets, sound asleep. He sees Nick and Brian across the room, also encased in blankets, also asleep. The memory of the previous evening’s deathwatch returns to Philip in stages, the agonizing, hopeless struggle to help the old man and to assuage April’s fears.

He glances across the room. In the shadows of the adjacent hallway, the door to the master bedroom is visible in the gloom, still closed.

Climbing out of his sleeping bag, Philip hurriedly and silently gets dressed. He pulls on his pants and pushes on his boots. He runs fingers through his hair and goes into the kitchen to rinse his mouth out. He hears the murmur of voices behind the walls. He goes over to the bedroom door and listens. He hears Tara’s voice.

She’s praying.

Philip knocks softly.

A moment later, the door clicks open and April is standing there, looking as though someone threw acid in her eyes. They are so bloodshot and wet that they look scourged. “’Morning,” she says in a low whisper.

“How’s he doing?”

Her lips tremble. “He ain’t.”

“What?”

“He’s gone, Philip.”

Philip stares at her. “Aw God…” He swallows hard. “I’m real sorry, April.”

“Yeah, well.”

She starts to cry. After an awkward moment—a wave of contrary emotions punching through Philip’s gut—he pulls her into an embrace. He holds her, and he strokes the back of her head. She trembles in his arms like a lost child. Philip doesn’t know what to say. Over April’s shoulder, he can see into the room.

Tara Chalmers is kneeling by the deathbed, praying silently, her head down on the tangled linen. One of her hands is lying on the cold, gnarled hand of her late father. For some reason that Philip can’t figure out, he finds it difficult to take his eyes off the sight of the girl’s hand caressing the bloodless fingers of the dead.

*   *   *

“I can’t get her to come out of there.” April is sitting at the kitchen table, sipping a cup of weak, tepid tea brewed on a Sterno can. Her eyes are clear for the first time since she came out of the death room that morning. “Poor thing … I think she’s trying to pray him back to life.”

“No shame in that,” Philip says. He sits across the table from her, a half-eaten bowl of rice in front of him. He has no appetite.

“Have you thought about what you want to do?” Brian asks from across the kitchen. He stands at the sink where he’s pouring water, which was collected from some of the toilets upstairs, into filter canisters.

The sounds of Nick and Penny playing cards in the other room drift in.

April looks up at Brian. “Do about what?”

“Your father … you know … like, burialwise?”

April sighs. “You’ve been through this before, haven’t you?” she says to Philip.

Philip looks at his uneaten rice. He has no idea if she’s talking about Bobby Marsh or Sarah Blake, both of whose deaths Philip recounted to April the other night. “Yes, ma’am, that’s true.” He looks at her. “Whatever you want to do, we’ll help you do it.”

“Of
course
we’ll bury him.” Her voice breaks a little bit. She looks down. “I just never pictured myself doing it in a place like this.”

“We’ll do it together,” Philip says. “We’ll do it right and proper.”

April looks down, a tear falling into her tea. “I hate this.”

“We gotta stick together,” Philip says without much conviction. He says it because he doesn’t know what else to say.

April wipes her eyes. “There’s a patch of ground out back under the—”

A sharp noise from the hallway interrupts, and all heads turn.

A muffled thump is followed by a crash, the sound of furniture overturning.

Philip is out of his chair before the others even realize that the noise is coming from behind the closed door of the master bedroom.

THIRTEEN

Philip kicks the door open. Advent candles on the floor. The carpet burning in places. The smoky air vibrating with screams. A blur of movement smears across the darkness and it takes breathless nanoseconds for Philip to realize what he’s looking at in the flickering shadows.

The overturned dresser—the source of the crashing noise—has landed inches away from Tara, who’s on the floor, crawling with animal instinct, trying desperately to pull herself free of the vise grip of dead fingers on her legs.

Dead fingers?

At first, just for an instant, Philip figures something got in through a window, but then he sees the withered form of David Chalmers—completely turned now—on the floor, on top of Tara’s legs, digging yellowed fingernails into her flesh. The old man’s sunken face is livid now, the color of mold, his eyes frosted with glassy-white cataracts. He snarls with a ravenous guttural groan.

Tara manages to extricate herself and struggles to her feet, and then slams sideways into the wall.

Right then, many things happen at once: Philip realizes what’s going on, and that he left his gun in the kitchen, and that he has a limited amount of time to eradicate this threat.

That is the key—the fact that the kindly old mandolin player is long gone—and what
this
is, this hulking mass of dead tissue rising up and growling a garbled, drooling cry, is a
threat.
More than the flames licking across the carpet, more than the smoke—already forming a nightmarish haze in the room—this
thing
that has materialized inside their sanctuary is the biggest threat.

A threat to all of them.

At this same moment, before Philip has a chance to even move, the others arrive, filling the open doorway. April lets out an anguished yelp—not really a scream, more like a shriek of pain, like an animal getting gut shot. She pushes her way into the room, but Brian grabs her and holds her back. April writhes in his arms.

All this happens in the space of an instant as Philip sees the bat.

In all the excitement on the previous night, April had left her Hank Aaron autographed metal baseball bat in the corner by the barred window. Now it sits gleaming in the flickering flames, maybe fifteen feet away from Philip. There is no time to consider the distance or even map out a maneuver in his mind. All he has time to do is make a lunge across the room.

By this point, Nick has whirled around and is racing across the apartment for his gun. Brian tries to pull April out of the room, but she’s strong and she’s frantic and she’s screaming now.