The Walking Dead (24 page)

It takes Philip mere seconds to cover the distance between the door and the bat. But in that brief span of time, the thing that was once David Chalmers goes for Tara. Before the large woman can get her bearings and flee the room, the dead man is upon her.

Cold, gray fingers ply themselves awkwardly toward her throat. She slams back against the wall, flailing at it, trying to push it away. Rotting jaws part, rancid breath wafting up in her face. Blackened teeth gape open. The thing goes for the pale, fleshy curve of her jugular.

Tara shrieks, but before the teeth have a chance to make contact, the bat comes down.

*   *   *

Up until this moment—especially for Philip—the act of vanquishing a moving corpse had become an almost perfunctory deed, as mechanical and obligatory as stunning a pig for the slaughter. But this feels different. It takes only three sharp blows.

The first one—a hard crack to the back temporal region of David Chalmers’s skull—stiffens the zombie and arrests its progress toward Tara’s neck. She slips to the floor in a paroxysm of tears and snot.

The second blow strikes the side of the skull as the thing is involuntarily turning toward its attacker, the tempered steel of the bat caving in the parietal bone and part of the nasal cavity, sending threads of pink matter into the air.

The third and final whack totals the entire left hemisphere of its skull as the thing is falling—the sound like a head of cabbage smashed in a drill press. The monster that was David Chalmers lands in a wet heap on one of the spilled candles, the ribbons of drool, blood, and gluey gray tissue hitting the flames and sizzling across the floor.

Philip stands over the body, out of breath, his hands still welded to the bat. Almost as punctuation to the horror, a high-pitched beeping noise begins to shrill. Battery-operated fire alarms across the first floor are loudly chirping, and it takes Philip a second to identify the sounds in his ringing ears. He drops the bloody bat.

And
that
is when he notices the difference.
This
time, after
this
extermination, nobody moves. April stares from the doorway. Brian releases his grip on her, and he
too
gapes. Even Tara, sitting up against the wall across the room, gripped in tears of revulsion and agony, settles into an almost catatonic stare.

The strangest thing is, rather than staring at the bloody heap on the floor, they are all staring at Philip.

*   *   *

In due course, they put out all the fires, and they clean the place up. They wrap the body and move it out into the corridor where it will be safe until burial.

Luckily, Penny witnessed very little of the debacle in the room. She
heard
enough of it, though, to make her withdraw back into her mute, invisible shell.

In fact, for quite a long time, nobody
else
has much to say, either, and the edgy silence continues throughout the rest of that day.

The sisters seem to be in some kind of shocked stupor, just going through the motions of the cleanup, not even talking to each other. They have each cried their eyes dry. But they keep staring at Philip; he can feel it like cold fingers on the back of his neck. What the hell did they expect? What did they want him to do? Let the monster feed on Tara? Did they want Philip to try and
negotiate
with the thing?

*   *   *

At noon the following day, they hold a makeshift memorial service in a section of the courtyard surrounded by a security fence. Philip insists on digging the grave himself, refusing assistance from even Nick. It takes hours. The Georgia clay is stubborn in this portion of the state. But by mid-afternoon, Philip is drenched in sweat and ready.

The sisters sing David’s favorite song—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken”—at his graveside. This reduces both Nick and Brian to tears. The sound of it is heartrending, especially as it carries up into the high blue sky and mingles with the omnipresent choir of groaning noises coming from outside the fence.

Later, they all sit around the living room, sharing the liquor that they had recovered from one of the apartments (and were saving for God knows what). The Chalmers sisters tell stories of their old man, his childhood, his early days in the Barstow Bluegrass Boys Band, and his time as a deejay on WBLR out of Macon. They speak of his temper, and his generosity, and his womanizing, and his devotion to Jesus.

Philip lets them talk and just listens. It’s good to finally hear their voices again, and the tension of the past day seems to be easing a little bit. Maybe it’s all part of their process of letting go, or maybe they just need to let it set in.

Later that night, Philip is in the kitchen, alone, refilling his glass with the last couple of fingers of sour mash whiskey, when April comes in.

“Look … I wanted to talk to you … about what happened and stuff.”

“Forget it,” Philip says, looking down into the caramel liquid in his glass.

“No, I should have … I should have said something sooner, I guess I was in shock.”

He looks at her. “I’m sorry it went down like it did, I truly am. I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“You did what you had to do.”

“And I thank you for saying that.” Philip pats her shoulder. “I took an instant liking to your daddy, he was a great piece of work. Lived a long good life.”

She chews the inside of her cheek, and Philip can tell she’s fighting the urge to cry. “I thought I was prepared for losing him.”

“Nobody’s ever prepared.”

“Yeah, but like
this
 … I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it.”

Philip nods. “Hell of a thing.”

“I mean … a person doesn’t … you just don’t have any reference point for this kinda shit.”

“I know what you mean.”

She looks at her hands, which are shaking. Maybe the memory of Philip bashing her father’s skull in is still lingering. “I guess all I wanted to say is … I ain’t blaming you for what you done.”

“Appreciate that.”

She looks at his drink. “We got any more of that cheap wine left?”

He finds a little bit left in one of the bottles and pours it for her. They drink in silence for a long while. Philip finally says, “What about your sis?”

“What about her?”

“She doesn’t seem to be…” His voice trails off, the proper words escaping him.

April nods. “In a forgiving kind of mood?”

“Something like that.”

April gives him a bitter smile. “She still blames me for stealing her lunch money back at Clark’s Hill Elementary.”

*   *   *

Over the next few days, the new blended family solidifies as the Chalmers sisters go through their grieving process, sometimes arguing over nothing, sometimes giving everybody else the silent treatment, sometimes holing up in their rooms for extended periods of crying or brooding.

April seems to be handling the transition better than her sister. She clears out her father’s things and moves into the master bedroom, giving Philip the room she originally occupied. Philip sets up a nice area for Penny with shelves and some coloring books he found upstairs.

The child is becoming attached to April. They spend hours together, exploring the upper floors, playing games, and experimenting with ways to stretch their meager provisions into nominal yet creative dinners cooked on Sterno flames, such as crumbled jerky stir-fry, peach and raisin casserole, and canned vegetable surprise (the surprise, sadly, turning out to be more shredded pieces of beef jerky).

*   *   *

Gradually, the hordes of undead drift away from the immediate area, leaving behind only a few stragglers, giving the Blakes and Nick a chance to test the limits of their reconnaissance missions to neighboring buildings. Philip notices that Brian is getting bolder, willing to venture out of the building now and again on quick trips. But it’s Nick Parsons who truly seems to be taking to this place.

Nick sets up a room for himself in a studio apartment on the second floor—number 2F—at the east end of the corridor. He finds books and magazines in other apartments, and drags spare furniture into the studio. He spends time hanging out on the balcony, sketching pictures of the neighboring streets, mapping out the immediate area, reading his Bible, starting a garden for winter vegetables, and thinking a lot about what has happened to the human race.

He also completes his ramshackle catwalk between the two adjacent buildings.

The narrow walkway is hewn out of plywood and paint ladders lashed together with rope and duct tape (and more than a little praying). The footbridge extends off the back of the roof, spanning a twenty-five-foot gap over an alley, and connecting up with the top rail of a fire escape on the adjacent roof.

The completion of the catwalk marks a turning point for Nick. Getting up his courage one day, he shimmies across the rickety structure and—just as he had predicted—he makes it all the way to the southeast corner of the block without walking outside. From there, he figures out how to get into the pedestrian bridge to the department store. When he comes back that night with armfuls of goodies from Dillard’s, he is greeted like a returning war hero.

He brings them fancy gourmet candy and nuts; warm clothing; new shoes and embossed stationery; expensive pens; a collapsible camp stove; satin sheets and luxurious three-hundred-thread-count linens; and even stuffed animals for Penny. Even Tara lightens up at the sight of the European cigarettes with the pastel wrappers. And Nick is doing something else on these solo runs, something that he keeps to himself at first.

*   *   *

On the one-week anniversary of David Chalmers’s death, Nick talks Philip into tagging along on a little reconnaissance mission so Nick can reveal what he’s been doing. Philip is not crazy about crossing the ladder-bridge—he claims he’s worried about it breaking under his weight, but the thing that truly bothers Philip is his secret fear of heights. Nick persuades him by piquing his curiosity. “You gotta see this, Philly,” Nick enthuses on the roof. “This whole area is a goldmine, man. I’m tellin’ you it’s perfect.”

With great reluctance, Philip goes ahead and drags himself across the catwalk, on his hands and knees behind Nick, grumbling all the way (and secretly petrified). Philip doesn’t dare look down.

They reach the other side, hop down, descend a fire escape ladder, and then slip into the adjacent building through an open window.

Nick leads Philip through the deserted hallways of an accounting firm, the floors littered with forgotten forms and documents like so many fallen leaves. “Not much farther now,” Nick says, ushering Philip down a staircase and across a desolate lobby strewn with overturned furniture.

Philip is hyperaware of their echoing footsteps, crunching over cinders of debris. He feels the blind spots and empty spaces in his solar plexus, he hears every snap and every tick as though something might lumber out at them at any moment. He keeps his hand on the stock of the .22 thrust into his jeans. “Over here, right off the parking garage,” Nick says, pointing to an alcove at the end of the lobby.

Around a corner. Past an overturned vending machine. Up a short flight of steps. Through an unmarked metal door, and suddenly, almost without warning, the entire world opens up for Philip.

“Holy mother-of-pearl,” Philip marvels as he follows Nick across the pedestrian bridge. The enclosed walkway is filthy, scattered with trash and reeking of urine, the thick, reinforced Plexiglas walls so filmed with grime they distort the surrounding cityscape. But the view is spectacular. The passageway is flooded with light, and it feels like you can see for miles.

Nick pauses. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty fucking outstanding.” Thirty feet above the street, the wind buffeting the structure, Philip can look down and see scattered zombies wandering underneath them like exotic fish drifting below a glass-bottom boat. “If it wasn’t for those ugly motherfuckers, I’d show this to Penny.”

“That’s what I wanted to show
you.
” Nick walks over to the south side of the walkway. “You see that bus? About half a block down there?”

Philip sees it—a hulking silver MARTA bus sitting at the curb.

Nick says, “Look above the bus’s front door, by the mirror, on the right side, you see the mark?”

Sure enough, Philip sees a hand-drawn symbol above the passenger entrance—a hastily scrawled five-point star—done in red spray paint. “What am I looking at?”

“It’s a safe zone.”

“A what?”

“Been working my way down that street and up this one back here,” Nick tells him with the innocent pride of a kid showing a soapbox derby model to his dad. “There’s a barber shop over there, clean as a whistle, secure as a bank, the door unlocked.” He points farther up the street. “There’s an empty semitrailer up there a ways, in good shape, just sitting there, with a good, strong—whattya call ’em—
accordion door
? On the back end.”

“What’s the point here, Nicky?”

“Safe zones. Places you can duck into. If you’re on a supply run and you get in trouble or whatever. I’m finding them farther and farther down the street. Putting marks on ’em so we don’t miss ’em. There’s all sorts of cubbyholes out there, you wouldn’t believe it.”