“Bullshit, dude, you so farted.”
“Did not.”
“You did, you so did—you just ripped one, and it was such a girl fart.”
Megan roars with laughter. “What the fucking hell is a girl fart?”
Scott guffaws. “It’s—it’s kinda like—kinda like a cute little toot. Like a little train engine. Toot-toot. The little fart that could…”
They both bend over with an uncontainable spasm of hilarity as a livid, milky-eyed face rises up like a small moon in the dark surface of the window at the rear of the camper. This one is male and middle-aged and nearly bald, its scalp mapped with deep blue veins and wisps of mildew-gray hair.
Neither Megan nor Scott sees it at first. They don’t see the wind blowing its mossy strands of thinning hair, or its greasy lips peeling back to expose blackened teeth, or the fumbling of insensate, rotting fingers as they push through the gap in the partially sprung hatch.
“OH, SHIT!” Scott blurts the words out on a stutter of sputtering laughter when he sees the intruder boarding. “OH, SHIT!!”
Megan now doubles over with convulsive laughter as Scott spins and falls on his face and then scuttles madly across the narrow floor space on his hands and knees toward the garden implements. He’s not laughing anymore. The zombie is already halfway inside the camper. The sound of its buzz-saw snarl and the stench of its decomposed tissues fill the air. Megan finally sees the intruder and she starts to cough and wheeze, her laughter garbling slightly.
Scott reaches for the pitchfork. The truck swerves. The zombie—all the way inside now—stumbles drunkenly sideways and slams into the wall. A stack of crates tumbles. Scott gets the pitchfork up and moving.
Megan scuttles backward, sliding along on her ass, burrowing into the far corner. The terror in her eyes seems incongruous with her high-pitched, hiccupping giggles. Like a motor that won’t stop turning, her garbled, deranged laughter continues as Scott stands up on wobbling knees and lunges with the pitchfork as hard as he can in the general direction of the moving corpse in front of him.
The rusty tines strike the side of the thing’s face as it’s turning.
One of the spikes impales the zombie’s left eye. The other points go into the mandible and jugular. Black blood ejaculates across the camper. Scott lets out a war cry and pulls the implement free. The zombie staggers backward toward the windblown hatch—which is flapping now—and for some reason, the second blow gets a huge, convulsive, crazed laugh out of Megan.
The tines sink into the thing’s skull.
This is so goddamn hilarious to Megan: the funny dead man shuddering as though electrocuted, with the fork sunk in his skull, his arms reaching impotently at the air. Like a silly circus clown in whiteface, with big goofy black teeth, the thing staggers backward for a moment, until the wind pressure pulls it out of the flapping rear hatch.
The pitchfork slips free of Scott’s grasp and the zombie tumbles off the truck. Scott falls on his ass, landing in a pile of clothes.
Both Megan and Scott crack up now at the absurdity of the zombie careening to the road with the pitchfork still planted in its skull. They both scuttle on hands and knees to the rear hatch and gaze out at the human remains receding into the distance behind them—the pitchfork still sticking straight out of its head like a mile marker.
Scott pulls the hatch shut and they both crack up again in spasms of stoned laughter and frenzied coughing.
Still giggling, her eyes wet, Megan turns toward the front of the camper. Through the cab window, she can see the backs of Lilly’s and Josh’s heads. They look preoccupied—oblivious to what just occurred only inches away from them. They appear to be pointing at something in the distance, way up on the crest of an adjacent hill.
Megan can’t believe that nobody in the cab heard the commotion in the rear camper. Was the road noise that loud? Was the struggle drowned out by the sound of giggling? Megan is about to bang on the glass when she finally sees what all the pointing is about.
Bob is turning off the road and heading up a steep dirt path toward a building that may or may not be abandoned.
FIVE
The deserted gas station sits at the top of a hill overlooking the surrounding orchards. Bordered on three sides by weed-whiskered clapboard fencing and scattered garbage Dumpsters, the place has a hand-painted sign over its twin fuel islands—one diesel and three gas pumps—which says FORTNOY’S FUEL AND BAIT. The single-story building features a flyspecked office, a retail store, and a small service garage with a single lift.
When Bob pulls in to the cracked cement lot—his lights off in order to avoid detection—night has fallen into full darkness, and the king cab’s tires crunch on broken glass. Megan and Scott peer out of the rear hatch, taking in the shadows of the abandoned property, as Bob pulls the truck around behind the garage area, out of the line of vision of any nosy passersby.
He parks the truck between the carcass of a wrecked sedan and a pillar of tires. A moment later, the engine cuts off and Megan hears the squeak of the passenger door and the heavy thud of Josh Lee Hamilton stepping out and coming around the back of the camper.
“Y’all stay put for a second,” Josh says softly, evenly, after opening the camper door and seeing Megan and Scott crouched near the hatch like a couple of owls. Josh doesn’t notice the blood spatters on the walls. He checks the cylinder of his .38, the blue steel gleaming in the darkness. “Gonna check this place for walkers.”
“I don’t mean to be rude but what the fuck?” Megan says, her buzz completely gone now, replaced by a kind of jagged adrenaline surge. “Didn’t you guys see what happened back here? Didn’t you hear what was going on?”
Josh looks at her. “All I heard was a couple of potheads partying to beat the band—smells like Mardi Gras in a whorehouse back here.”
Megan tells him what happened.
Josh gives Scott a look. “Surprised you had the wherewithal … your brain scrambled like that.” Josh’s expression softens. He lets out a sigh and smiles at the kid. “Congratulations, junior.”
Scott gives him a cockeyed little grin. “My first kill, boss.”
“Chances are it won’t be your last,” Josh says, snapping the cylinder shut.
“Can I just like ask one more thing?” Megan says then. “What’re we doing here? I thought we had enough gas.”
“It’s too hairy out there for night travel. Best to hunker down till morning. Gonna need you two to stay put until you get the all clear.”
Josh walks off.
Megan shuts the door. In the darkness, she feels Scott’s gaze on her. She turns and looks at him. He has a weird look in his eyes. She grins at him. “Dude, I gotta admit, you are pretty damn handy with the garden tools—pretty goddamn bad-ass with that pitchfork.”
He grins back at her. Something changes in his eyes, as though he sees her for the first time—despite the darkness—and he licks his lips. He wipes a strand of dirty blond hair from his eyes. “It was nothing.”
“Yeah, right.” For a while now, Megan has been marveling at how much Scott Moon resembles Kurt Cobain. The resemblance seems to radiate off him with atavistic magic, his face shimmering in the darkness, his scent—patchouli oil and smoke and sweet-leaf and bubble gum—casting out and swirling in Megan’s brain.
She grabs him and mashes her lips on top of his, and he pulls her hair, and grinds his mouth into hers, and soon their tongues are intertwined and their midsections are gnashing against each other.
“Fuck me,” she whispers.
“Here?” he utters. “Now?”
“Maybe not,” she says, looking around, breathless. Her heart races. “Let’s wait until he’s done inside and we’ll find a place.”
“Cool,” he says, and he reaches out and fondles her through her torn Grateful Dead T-shirt. She jams her tongue in his mouth. Megan needs him now, this instant—she needs relief, badly.
She pulls away. In the darkness, the twosome stare at each other, breathing ha
rd, like wild animals that would kill each other if they weren’t the same species.
* * *
Megan and Scott find a place to consummate their lust only moments after Josh issues the all clear.
The two stoners don’t fool anybody, in spite of their perfunctory attempts to be discreet: Megan feigns exhaustion and Scott suggests that he fix her a place to sleep on the floor of the storeroom in the rear of the retail shop. The cramped storage area—two hundred square feet of mildewed tile and exposed plumbing—reeks of dead fish and cheese bait. Josh tells them to be careful and rolls his eyes as he walks away, disgusted, and maybe, just maybe, a little jealous.
The thumping sounds start up almost immediately, even before Josh returns to the office, where Lilly and Bob are unpacking a knapsack full of supplies for the night. “What the hell is that?” Lilly asks the big man when he returns.
Josh shakes his head. The muffled thudding noises of two bodies going at it in the other room reverberate through the tight quarters of the filling station. Every few moments, a gasp or a moan swells above the rhythmic fucking sounds. “Young love,” he says with exasperation.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Lilly stands shivering in the dark front office as Bob Stookey nervously unpacks bottled water and blankets from a crate, pretending not to hear the carnal noises. Lilly holds herself as though she might disintegrate at any moment. “So this is what we have to look forward to?”
The power at Fortnoy’s is down, the fuel reservoirs empty, and the air in the building as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. The retail shop appears to be picked clean. Even the filthy refrigerator is emptied of earthworms and minnows. The front office features a dusty rack of magazines, a single vending machine running low on stale candy bars and bags of chips, rolls of toilet paper, a few overturned plastic contour chairs, a shelf of antifreeze and car deodorizers, and a scarred wooden counter on which sits a cash register that looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. The register’s drawer is open and empty.
“Maybe they’ll get it out of their systems.” Josh checks his last cigar, which sits partially burned down in his jacket pocket. He glances around the office for a smoke rack. The place looks ransacked. “Looks like the Fortnoy boys left in a hurry.”
Lilly touches her bruised eye. “Yeah, I guess the looters got here before we did.”
“How you holdin’ up?” Josh asks her.
“I’ll live.”
Bob glances up from his crate of supplies. “Have a seat, Lillygirl.” He positions one of the contour chairs against the window. The light of the harvest moon shines in and stripes the floor in silver dusty shadows as Bob cleans his hands with a sterile wipe. “Let’s check them bandages.”
Josh watches as Lilly takes a seat and Bob opens a first-aid kit.
“Hold still now,” Bob admonishes softly as he carefully dabs an alcohol wipe around the crusty edges of Lilly’s injured eye. The skin under her brow has swollen to the size of a hardboiled egg. Lilly keeps flinching, and that bothers Josh. He bites back the urge to go to her, to hold her, to stroke her downy soft hair. The sight of those wavy mahogany tendrils dangling down across her narrow, delicate, bruised face is killing the big man.
“Ouch!” Lilly cringes. “Go easy, Bob.”
“Got a nasty shiner there, but if we can keep it clean, you oughtta be good to go.”
“Go where?”
“That’s a damn good question.” Bob carefully unhooks the Ace bandage around her ribs, gently palpates the bruised areas with his fingertips. Lilly flinches again. “Ribs ought to heal on their own, as long as you don’t get into any wrestling matches or marathon races.”
Bob replaces the elastic bandage around her midriff, then puts a fresh butterfly bandage on her eye. Lilly gazes up at the big man. “What are you thinking, Josh?”
Josh looks around the place. “We’ll spend the night here, take turns keeping watch.”
Bob tears off a piece of surgical tape. “Gonna get colder than a witch’s boob in here.”
Josh sighs. “Saw a generator in the garage, and we got blankets. Place is pretty secure and we’re up high enough on this ridge to see any large numbers of them things forming out there before they get to us.”
Bob finishes up and closes the first-aid kit. The muffled sounds of fornication dwindle in the other room, a momentary break in the action. In that brief stretch of silence, over the sound of the wind rattling the signage out front, Josh hears the distant a cappella of the dead—that faint telltale throb of dead vocal cords—like a broken pipe organ, moaning and gurgling in atonal unison. The noise stiffens the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.
Lilly listens to the distant chorus. “They’re multiplying, aren’t they?”
Josh shrugs. “Who knows.”
Bob reaches into the pocket of his tattered down coat. He roots out his flask, thumbs off the cap, and takes a healthy swig. “You think they smell us?”
Josh goes over to the grimy front window and gazes out at the night. “I think all the activity at Camp Bingham’s been drawing ’em out of the woodwork for weeks now.”
“How far from base camp are we, ya think?”
“Not much more than a mile or so, as the crow flies.” Josh gazes out over the pinnacles of distant pines, their swaying ocean of boughs as dense as black lace. The sky has cleared, and now the heavens are spangled with a riot of icy-cold stars.
Across the needlework of constellations rise wisps of wood smoke from the tent city.
“Been thinking about something…” Josh turns and looks at his companions. “This place ain’t the Ritz but if we can do a little scavenging, maybe find some more ammunition for the guns … we might be better off staying put for a while.”
The notion hangs in the silent office for a moment, sinking in.
* * *
The next morning, after a long, restless night sleeping on the cold cement floor of the service bay—making do with threadbare blankets and taking shifts standing guard—they have a group meeting to decide what to do. Over cups of instant coffee prepared on Bob’s Coleman stove, Josh convinces them that the best thing to do is stay holed up there for the time being. Lilly can heal up, and if necessary, they can steal provisions from the nearby tent city.
By this point, nobody puts up much of a fight. Bob has discovered a stash of whiskey under a counter in the bait shop, and Megan and Scott alternate between getting high and “spending quality time” in the back room for hours on end. They work hard that first day to secure the place. Josh decides against running the generator indoors for fear of gassing them to death with the fumes, and worries about running it outdoors for fear of drawing unwanted attention. He finds a wood-burning stove in the storeroom and a pile of lumber scraps out behind one of the Dumpsters.
Their second night at Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait, they get the temperature up to tolerable levels in the service area by keeping the stove going full blast, and Megan and Scott noisily keep each other warm in the back room under layers of blankets. Bob gets drunk enough not to notice the cold, but he seems disturbed by the muffled bumping sounds coming from the storeroom. Eventually, the older man gets so loaded he can barely move. Lilly helps him into his bedroll as though putting a child down for the night. She even sings a lullaby to him—a Joni Mitchell song, “The Circle Game”—as she tucks the mildewed blanket around his aging, wattled neck. Oddly, she feels responsible for Bob Stookey, even though he’s the one who’s supposed to be nursing her.
* * *
Over the next few days, they reinforce the doors and windows, and they wash themselves in the big galvanized sinks in the rear of the garage. They settle into a sort of grudging routine. Bob winterizes his truck, cannibalizing parts off some of the wrecks, and Josh supervises regular reconnaissance missions to the outer edges of the tent city a mile to the west. Under the campers’ noses, Josh and Scott are able to steal firewood, fresh water, a few discarded tent rolls, some canned vegetables, a box of shotgun shells, and a case
of Sterno. Josh notices the fabric of civilized behavior straining at the seams in the tent city. He hears more and more arguments. He sees fistfights among some of the men, and heavy drinking going on. The stress is taking its toll on the settlers.
During the darkness of night, Josh keeps a tight lid on Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait. He and the others stay inside, keeping as quiet as possible, burning a minimum number of emergency candles and lanterns, jumping at the intermittent noises caused by the increasing winds. Lilly Caul finds herself wondering which is the deadlier menace—the zombie hordes, her fellow human beings, or the encroaching winter. The nights are getting longer and the cold is setting in. It’s forming rimes of frost on the windows and getting into people’s joints, and although no one talks about it much, the cold is the silent menace that could actually destroy them far easier and more efficiently than any zombie attack.
In order to fight the boredom and constant undercurrents of fear, some of the inhabitants of Fortnoy’s develop hobbies. Josh begins rolling homemade cigars out of tobacco leaves that he harvests from neighboring fields. Lilly starts a diary, and Bob finds a treasure trove of old fishing lures in an unmarked trunk in the bait shop. He spends hours in the ransacked retail shop, perched at a workbench in back, compulsively winding fly-fishing lures for future use. Bob plans to bag some nice trout, redfish, or walleyes in the shallows of a nearby river. He keeps the bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the bench at all times, tippling from it day and night.
The others notice the rate at which Bob is going through the hooch, but who can blame him? Who can blame anybody for drowning his nerves in this cruel purgatory? Bob is not proud of his drinking. In fact, he’s downright ashamed of it. But that’s why he needs the medicine—to stave off the shame, and the loneliness, and the fear, and the horrible night terrors of blood-spattered bunkers in Kandahar.
On Friday of that week, in the wee hours of the night—Bob notes in his paper calendar that the date is November 9—he finds himself back at the workbench in the rear of the shop, winding flies, getting shit-faced as usual, when he hears the shuffling noises coming from the storeroom. He hadn’t noticed Megan and Scott slipping away earlier that evening, nor had he detected the telltale odors of marijuana residue cooking in a pipe, nor had he heard the muffled giggling coming through the thin walls. But now he notices something else that had eluded his attention that day.
The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury Page 8
