The only problem now is Norma. She hobbles after them, holding her side, wheezing like a rusty engine slipping its cogs, her expression a heartbreaking mixture of exhaustion, grief, and hopelessness. When Lilly reaches the bottom rung of the ancient, wrought-iron ladder, Norma waves both hands as though finally surrendering on the battlefield to an unnamed enemy combatant. “You folks go on,” she says, pausing about fifteen feet behind Tommy.
The boy whirls. “What?!—no, no, no, no, no. We have to stick together. Whaddaya talking about?”
Norma can hardly breathe. She bends over and puts her plump hands on her knees as though she’s about to vomit. “I’m just holding y’all back.”
“Stop it!” Lilly reaches up and tugs on the ladder’s bottom rung, making the entire apparatus squeak noisily as she pulls it down. “We stick together. That’s it. End of discussion.”
“Maybe Jinx was right. I never should have come along in the first place.” Norma swallows hard and breathes in pained gasps as though unable to get air into her lungs. “I’m gonna get us all killed.” She starts backing away. “I’ll be okay, I’ll find y’all later.”
“Norma, please—”
“I’ll be okay,” she reiterates with a nod, catching her breath and backing away. The look in her eyes says everything. It makes Lilly’s stomach clench.
“Norma, stop. What are you doing? Don’t do this.” Lilly lowers the ladder the rest of the way. “Tommy, c’mon … up you go.”
Tommy climbs the ladder to the first landing, pauses, and looks down.
Norma gives them a downtrodden wave. “I wish y’all Godspeed. I know you’ll find them kids, and you’ll get them back home safe and sound.”
Lilly stares. “Norma, don’t do this.” A pang of terror stabs Lilly in the gut. She realizes that she not only expected this to happen but she has been dreading it ever since they left Woodbury. Norma Sutters has been—and continues to be—a voice of reason amidst the insanity of this suicidal rescue mission. But deep down, Lilly knows that she can’t listen to reason. Operating on a deeper sort of animal instinct now, Lilly has thrown reason out the window.
Tommy wipes his eyes, looks down, and says, “Go ahead, leave, we don’t need you! Get out of here! We don’t want you anymore so go ahead and—”
“Tommy!” Lilly gazes up at the boy. “Stop it!” Lilly looks at Norma. “He doesn’t mean it.”
“That’s aw’right.” Norma keeps backing toward the mouth of the alley. She gives the boy a crestfallen smile, the look of a mother leaving a son at college. “You take care of Lilly, honey child.” She gives him a patient, loving nod. “You’re the man of the house now.”
Then she turns and hobbles away, leaving Lilly raw and hollowed out inside.
* * *
It takes Lilly and the boy mere minutes to scale the remaining five stories of the iron ladder. When they reach the rooftop of the Chubb Insurance Group building, they’re out of breath, sweaty, and jittery with nerves. The floor of the roof is a composite of gravel and tarpaper. The wind moans, gusting across the exposed clutter, whistling through weather-beaten metal chimney vents, medusa-like tangles of conduits, and air ducts the size of refrigerators. Dust devils of bird feathers and debris swirl up into the atmosphere like ghosts in the pale afternoon sunlight.
They hear the gunfire booming down in the glass canyons below, echoing up into the clouds. They hurry across the roof to the west ledge. They lean over the rusty metal flashing of the precipice and see the figures down below moving like pawns on a chessboard.
At first, gradually registering what is unfolding down there, Tommy lets out a moan—a strangled mixture of shame, guilt, rage, and bloodlust. His voice comes out in a low, almost feral groan: “We gotta do something.” Almost involuntarily, he rises up and turns. “We have to help her!” He starts toward the other side of the roof when Lilly suddenly grabs him. He wriggles angrily in her grasp. “Let go—let go of me!”
She hisses her words at him, a whisper loud enough to be heard over the wind but soft enough to go undetected by those six stories down: “Keep it down! Tommy, look at me. There’s nothing we can do.”
“But we can’t just let her—”
“We can’t get down there quick enough, it’ll be over before we get halfway down the ladder.”
“Fuck!” Tommy goes back over to the ledge and gazes over the lip of the roof. He clenches his fists and breathes harder as he watches the chase unfold down in the labyrinth of side streets and alleyways. “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!”
Down at ground level, unarmed, alone, and desperate, Norma Sutters races around the corner of Ralph McGill Boulevard and down Northeast Street as fast as her plump, arthritic legs will carry her. Even at this height and distance, it’s clear that the woman is hurting, gasping for breath, drenched in sweat, pumping her arms as she runs, pumping them madly as though flailing at demons. Tommy wants to grab Lilly’s assault rifle and lay down suppressing fire but instead he just watches and clenches his fists.
Half a block behind the woman, Bryce and his men follow, firing intermittently, gaining on her. The booming reports make Norma flinch as she runs, throwing off her gait, threatening to knock her off her feet. Bullets ricochet and spark off street signs and telephone poles next to her as she tears around another corner and heads east down Avenue E.
Almost instantly, it becomes apparent that she made a huge mistake. Her stride falters, and she nearly trips over her own feet as she sees the swarm of dead people ahead of her, blocking her path. They span the width of the hospital service entrance, several rows deep, like a disorganized army of pasty-faced junkies, staggering toward this unexpected morsel of living human flesh in their midst.
The portly woman skids to a stop. She looks over her shoulder and sees the paramilitary unit behind her racing around the corner of Northeast Street and Avenue E, boxing her in, trapping her, and firing off another volley of controlled blasts.
Norma ducks behind a ramshackle dumpster, bullets pinging and puckering the metal. Walkers close in, and Bryce and his men turn their attention to the swarm, unleashing a barrage on the dead.
Moldering skulls erupt, from the vantage point of the roof looking like strings of bloody firecrackers popping, water balloons bursting, blooms of pink tissue blossoming in a rotten garden. Emaciated figures fold one at a time, dropping in gruesome heaps. Tommy points at the fence behind the dumpster. “Look!” His voice is hoarse with terror, crumbling with emotion. “Look what she’s doing!”
Lilly can see Norma Sutters on her hands and knees behind the dumpster. She has discovered a hole in the fence near a pile of refuse and discarded tires. Now she pushes it open with her bare hands. She crawls through it, struggles to her feet, and trundles as fast as she can across a deserted courtyard. She finds a narrow opening between two buildings and lurches through it.
“Oh shit,” Tommy mutters, clutching the edge of the roof’s metal flashing and gazing down at the far intersection of Highland Avenue and Northeast.
He can see that Norma has inadvertently stumbled into another trap. Surrounded by the massive ruins of overturned semitrailers and unidentifiable pileups long ago decimated by fire and turned into mountains of scorched rubble, she staggers to a stop, turns, frantically searches for a way out of the boxed-in corner. She drops to her hands and knees again and peers under the wreckage, and she sees another swarm coming from the south, and another one closing in from the east. From the north, Bryce and his men approach.
Lilly whispers, almost under her breath, “Goddamn, Norma, get the fuck out of there!”
Then the strangest thing happens. Norma rises back up to her feet, turns toward the oncoming soldiers, and brushes herself off as though about to face a firing squad. She juts her chin. She puts her hands on her hips. She cocks her head. And from such a high, distant vantage point, it’s hard to be certain, but it looks as though she’s about to bawl somebody out.
The sight of this gobsmacks Tommy. “What the hel
l is she doing? What the fuck—?”
Lilly sees the portly woman flinch again at a warning shot fired into the air by one of Bryce’s men. The soldiers close in on her. The walkers close in. Norma is doomed, and she begins to almost involuntarily back away from the men approaching with their guns and grenade launchers. She doesn’t see the manhole cover hanging loose and partially ajar ten feet behind her. But Lilly sees it, and soon Tommy does as well, and Tommy grips that metal ledge with vise-clamp intensity, his knuckles going white, as he softly murmurs, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no—!”
Neither Lilly nor Tommy can move or speak or do anything other than gape down at the street as Norma backs toward that defective manhole cover. The inevitable is about to happen and nobody can do anything about it. Norma raises her hands in surrender as the soldiers approach. Muzzles are raised and trained on the plump woman in the middle of the intersection, and Bryce calls out to her.
It’s hard to hear what Bryce is saying from the windy precipice six stories up, but it’s clear that the back of Norma’s heels are inches from that fucking manhole. She keeps unconsciously backing up … and backing up … and backing up … until Tommy can’t watch anymore.
Lilly gasps as the portly woman takes one last shuffling step backward and suddenly, without much ceremony or warning, accidentally steps on that loose manhole cover and plunges down into the dark cavity of shadows under Highland Avenue. From the rooftop, it would almost look like a magic act if it weren’t for the back of Norma’s head hitting the rim of pavement and blood spurting from her scalp, followed by the loud clang of that manhole cover flipping backward onto the pavement with the impact of Norma’s body falling through. Then comes the resounding metallic thunk.
Norma’s hasty, unexpected disappearing act takes Bryce and his men aback.
They stand with weapons raised for a moment as though not believing their own eyes. Bryce stays very still, staring, completely thunderstruck. At last, he holsters his pistol, turns to his men, and says something that Lilly assumes is filled with epithets and reprimands for being such poor shots that they couldn’t pick off a single, middle-aged, overweight matron. Lilly feels her spine tingling, the rage and sorrow a potent cocktail, galvanizing her this time. All at once, she’s vibrating like a tuning fork, no longer thinking about Norma, or about loss and grief and senseless death. All she’s thinking about now is the plan …
… and watching Bryce’s next move with the intensity of a hawk watching a field mouse.
* * *
It doesn’t take Bryce and his men long to decide it’s time to retreat. The sheer number of dead converging on the area due to all the noise and odors of human infiltration proves too much of a threat to ignore. Lilly watches all this from the roof of the Chubb building, her eyes narrowing to slits in the wind, her veins roiling with adrenaline. She can taste the vengeance on her tongue like metal. Her hands tingle. The pangs and bruises from the skirmish in the parking garage—exacerbated by the agonizing loss of Jinx and Norma—have all but succumbed to the buzzing sensation in her vertebrae, that invisible timepiece inside her solar plexus ticking … ticking … ticking.
Across the roof, Tommy Dupree is still processing Jinx’s and Norma’s demises. Sitting off by himself, Indian style, on the pebbly deck, he has his back turned to Lilly, his gaze cast down into his lap as though praying.
Lilly goes over to him, touches his shoulder. “C’mon, next part of the plan’s in play!”
“What fucking plan?”
“Watch your language and c’mon, let’s get moving before we lose them.”
Something sparks behind his eyes. Lilly notices it. Maybe he’s thinking about his brother and sister. He gets up and takes a deep breath. “Okay, I’m good. I’m ready.” He bites his lip, his jaw set, his eyes glazed with anguish. “Let’s do it.”
They creep across the west edge of the roof, silently tracking the soldiers below. From this height, Bryce and his men look like a single-file line of insects with their dark carapaces of Kevlar and nylon and motorcycle helmets, their guns shouldered with muzzles sticking up like antennae. The sun has crested the tops of neighboring buildings, and Lilly takes care not to lean over the ledge too far for fear her shadow will cast down across the street and give her away.
At the corner of Northeast and Ralph McGill, the soldiers turn left and head west down the four-lane thoroughfare. They walk two abreast now, guns at the ready due to clusters of walkers closing in on them from either flank. From Lilly’s vantage point, the dead look like scorched mannequins, reanimated through some dark magic, one blackened body indistinguishable from the next. Bryce orders two of his men to use silencers and small arms in order to pick off the front line of these roamers without drawing more of the herd from the excessive noise.
The sounds of .22-caliber blasts echo like balloons popping up the sides of the iron canyon.
Lilly is so mesmerized and fixated by the exodus down below that she doesn’t realize she’s about to run out of roof. She sees Bryce gesturing at his men as he marches along with his trademark John Wayne stride, ordering some of his goons off to the north for some unknown reason. Then he grabs the two-way from his second in command and starts barking orders over the radio. More walkers close in on the soldiers. The wind kicks up again down in the tunnels between buildings, blowing trash and moaning. Lilly is watching all this with laser intensity when she hears Tommy’s voice.
“Holy shit, look out!”
Lilly turns just in time to see that she has reached the end of the roof, and the next step she takes will be off the edge of the precipice. Tommy grabs her. Lilly’s heart skips a beat as she lurches back away from the ledge. Dizziness courses over her. She nearly drops her assault rifle. The sudden vertigo makes her vision blur, the wind buffeting the side of the Chubb building.
“Fuck,” she utters under her breath. “That was too fucking close.”
“You got that right.” Tommy stands back, shivering in the wind. His expression is heartrending. “We’re gonna lose them. Aren’t we?”
“No. No, we’re not gonna lose them.”
“We’re never going to find Luke and Bethany, are we?”
Lilly turns to the boy and takes him by the shoulders, and once again she looks deep into his eyes and squeezes him gently, with tenderness rather than harshness. “Listen to me, I know you’re broken up about our friends, what’s happened. I am, too.”
He nods and looks down. “I’m okay.”
“No. Tommy, listen to me. We don’t have the luxury to grieve right now.”
“I know.”
“We have a job to do.”
He looks up at her. “I just want to find my brother and sister.”
Lilly nods slowly but offers no reply. She notices something behind the young man’s glittering, moist eyes—a familiar look that she’s seen in the mirror many times—and it girds her, replenishes her, strengthens her resolve. She turns back to the precipice and gazes over the ledge at the street down below.
Bryce and his men have picked off another half dozen of the dead, and now the street behind them is starting to look like a battlefield, blood smears and human remains riddling the pavement between the piles of wreckage.
The soldiers make their way around another corner, now striding in that compulsory two-abreast formation down Parkway Drive. The once-landscaped road that wends its way around the west side of the Atlanta Medical Center now lies scarred and cratered with the aftermath of violence and human chaos.
Lilly sees Bryce heading toward the side entrance to the hospital. “We got these bastards,” she mutters under her breath. She turns and looks at the boy. “We got ’em, Tommy.”
TWELVE
Under optimum conditions, the jump from the top of the Chubb building to the uppermost deck of the medical center parking complex would give a Delta Force commando pause. No zip line, no safety net, nothing but crackled cement pavement on which to land, and no guarantee that the wind isn’t goi
ng to blow you off course. By Lilly’s calculations, the drop is about twenty feet. If she and Tommy are able to roll on impact—avoiding any broken bones or twisted ankles—they should be okay. But complicating matters is the fact that the gap between the two buildings is at least ten feet, so there’s quite a bit of space to cross. “Let’s not overthink it, let’s just do it,” Lilly advises, speaking more to herself than Tommy, as she backs away from the ledge, strapping the AR-15 securely to her shoulder. She gets a running start and she leaps, arms pinwheeling as she soars out across the windswept space between the buildings and then lands on the hard tarmac of the parking complex.
The impact drives her knees up into her chest and sends a lightning bolt of agony down her spine. She shoulder rolls, the weapon slipping and skidding across the pavement. She slams into a pillar, which knocks the air from her lungs and shoots Roman candles of light across her field of vision. For a moment, she can’t breathe and gasps for air as she flops onto her back. She stares at the sky until she can breathe again. A moment later, Tommy jumps.
Blame it on his youth, or blame it on different body types, but the wiry young man takes the fall a lot better than Lilly. He lands squarely on his feet and staggers for a moment but never falls. He scuttles to a stop on the gritty pavement near the pillar and trots over to Lilly. “You okay?—You all right, Lilly?”
“Yeah … just great.” She lets out a pained grunt. “Never better.” Tommy offers her his hand and helps her up. Lilly brushes herself off and takes deep breaths. She looks around the deserted uppermost deck of the parking complex. She sees a few abandoned cars, their windows broken out, the hoods up, a few overturned wheelchairs. She checks her weapon. “C’mon, we gotta get outta sight.”
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