Search and Destroy

by Jay Bonansinga

  The woman in the ponytail falls to the ground, vomit roaring out of her from the smell and the horrible slime of decomposing flesh on her skin, as the dead chemist, still clad in the costume, staggers backward, blindly and dumbly rearing his mutilated face. The closest members of the horde close in for the kill.

  A single shot rings out, echoing down the cavities of the city as the woman fires on her attackers. She empties the remaining round into the closest walker, a nosy male in filthy overalls with a gaping hole in its midsection from which its entrails hang like strands of sausage in a store window. The male goes down in a gusher of oily, rotting fluids.

  The woman pivots and finds an opening between two clusters of dead quickly collapsing in on her. She lowers her head and charges through the gap as fast as her wobbly legs will convey her, shoving one of them aside so hard the creature knocks down three others.

  Within seconds, the woman in the ponytail has crossed a vacant lot and made her way up Oakland Avenue. All the while she keeps glancing over her shoulder at the enormous message spray painted in huge letters across the top of the interstate bridge.

  LILLY IF YOU MAKE IT OUT ALIVE GO TO MEGAN’S

  TWENTY-THREE

  She gets lucky just north of Whitehall Street. Keeping under the radar of the horde, creeping silently through the garbage-strewn ditches and overgrown foliage of the train yards, she’s been heading north for nearly an hour now. The sky has darkened and pressed down on the city, another storm on the wind, and Lilly has been worrying for a while now that she’ll never make it all the way to the Georgia Tech student ghetto where Megan Lafferty used to rent her cozy little condo. Lilly assumes that it was Tommy Dupree who wrote that message across the top of the viaduct, but she has no idea how the hell he could have known about Megan, let alone where her former digs are. But what choice does Lilly have now? Hitchhiking back to Woodbury is out of the question, and there’s a scarcity of taxis available downtown nowadays.

  Out of options, out of ideas, out of ammo, she’s just about ready to collapse when she sees in her peripheral vision both flanks of the train yard begin to rustle and teem with movement. She glances to the left and to the right and sees the yard filling up with walkers. The twin waves of the dead have snuck up on her like low rolling tsunamis from each direction—her throbbing concussion, the dizziness, and the lingering effects of the Nightshade dulling her senses and tunneling her vision—and she now realizes that she’s trapped. If she retreats, she’ll run into the third wave pushing up from the south. If she tries to make a run for it—heading north—she’s screwed. The two regiments will collapse in on her and devour her.

  She stumbles to a stop, and turns and turns, seeing no way out.

  “Okay, now what?” She talks to herself in a voice that’s cracking apart, her vocal cords in tatters. “What’s the next move, genius?” She whirls and gazes at the oncoming throngs. “C’mon, you’ve been in worse jams than this.” She sees hundreds of pairs of milky, fishy eyes reflecting the overcast sky—all locked onto her, floating toward her—the hunger so palpable it practically hums in her ears. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, think.” She pulls the empty gun and holds it in her right hand—a security blanket, maybe a bludgeon—if she could only wish another six rounds into that cylinder. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”

  As the vast sea of cadavers presses in, a stray thought flicks through her mind on a sparking synapse of terror. You can’t go around them, you can’t go through them, you can’t go under them, you can’t go over them. She sees something important in the near distance. “Go over them … fuck yes … go over them.”

  The distant ladder gleams a dull copper color: a series of iron rungs rising up the rear of a derelict caboose car.

  The horde closes around her as she takes off in a dead run, the back of the caboose fifty yards away.

  She fixes her gaze on it and lowers her head as she runs, the horde undulating and shifting languidly in response to her flight, some of them blocking her path, clawing at her. But by now she’s built up enough of a head of steam that she bangs into the bolder ones as she approaches the rear of the train. The walkers go down like dominos.

  She reaches the ladder and scuttles up the end of the caboose.

  * * *

  She starts down the length of an abandoned freight train that stretches for miles, literally hundreds of old boxcars with flat, corrugated rooftops left to rust and decay in the elements. Tangles of wild foliage and weeds have grown up between some of them, while others have sunken into the ground. Some of the couplers have come undone, and the gap between those requires Lilly to vault across spans of ten feet or more, which she happily does, jumping from boxcar to boxcar, gradually working her way north before the very eyes of the shambling horde.

  The train tracks run alongside the Marietta Street artery, a major thoroughfare Lilly used to travel each night to get to her class at Georgia Tech, now as desolate as the River Styx. Much of the wreckage that blocks the street looks as though it has melted into the mossy, fetid surface of the pavement, the ironweed and vines cocooning it and turning it the color of bile. The lightning of the previous night has caught pockets of methane on fire, and now plumes of yellow flame dot the roadway. Megan’s place on Delaney Street is still a good mile to a mile and a half away, but Lilly starts to believe that she’s going to make it. The fossilized train seems to go on forever.

  The walker population in this part of the city has grown since Lilly has been out of commission. Now the length and breadth of the swarm boggles the mind. In certain quarters, the dead number in the tens of thousands, the tops of their decaying skulls like stones floating on a sea of moldering remains, an ocean of moving corpses that seems to stretch as far as the Georgia Dome a half mile away. The air is so toxic and dank and thick with death-stench that an early-morning fog clings to the ground, shot through with black motes of ash and shiny pieces of particulate the texture of fish scales.

  The sight of all this has a strange effect on Lilly as she leaps from boxcar to boxcar. It invigorates her, galvanizes her, makes her sniff back the fear as though snorting smelling salts. She pulls the rubber band off her ponytail and shakes her hair loose. The foul wind blows through it and makes her feel amazing. She feels more alive than ever—her aches and pains long forgotten now—and she quickens her pace.

  “Fuck you all!” She gives the throngs a wave and then the middle finger salute. “Eat me!” She giggles in the wind as she runs. “EAT ME, MOTHERFUCKERS!” She chortles with laughter as she reaches the end of a long boxcar. “EEEEEEEEEAT ME!!” She leaps triumphantly through the air toward the roof of a battered passenger car ten feet away.

  When she lands, the roof collapses with the impact of her weight.

  She plunges through a cloud of dust and debris, and lands hard on the metal edge of a bench seat, the pain so sudden and enormous that she instantly blacks out.

  * * *

  Sometime later, the rattle of an automatic rifle stirs her. She twitches painfully at each noisy burst, waking with a start and feeling the searing, white-hot branding-iron of pain in her lower back.

  She can barely breathe, lying crumpled in a fetal position on the shopworn leather bench in the middle of the Amtrak passenger car, but the sound of bullets strafing the side of the train gets her to look up and focus on her surroundings. The pale sun shines down directly above her, penetrating the massive, gaping hole in the roof through which she fell. Stalactites of fiberglass and metal hang down, and the air inside the car swims with specks of dust and ash. She turns her head—a move rife with pain—and sees human remains near the car’s front pass-through door.

  The engineer looks as though he’s been dead for years, his skin the color of earthworms, the flesh of his skull stretched taut like a death mask. The shotgun is still gripped in his frozen hands, the muzzle aimed at his mouth, the top of his head blossomed open, the aftermath of his suicide marking the wall behind him as black as an inkblot. The sight of him—combined wit
h the rising noise of gunfire—convinces Lilly to sit up. But when she tries, the pain explodes in her sacrum. She slips off the bench and hits the floor with a gasp.

  Her back must have taken the brunt of the fall, one of her legs now as numb as deadwood. She crawls across the floor to the window, the agony like a hot poker stabbing up through her lower back.

  It takes massive effort to pull herself up to the sill in order to see outside. When she finally accomplishes this and looks out, she sees a black, bullet-riddled Escalade backing toward her, an assault rifle blazing out one of the rear windows, the salvos picking off the closest walkers and making a path.

  Lilly exhales painfully as the vehicle reaches the train car and skids to a stop. She can barely move. She has no idea if these are friends or foes but there’s nothing she can do about it now. She’s at their mercy. The Escalade’s rear latch clicks, and the hatch jumps open.

  “You’re sure this is the one you saw her fall through,” the young man inside the cargo bay is asking his comrade. He’s a rough-hewn Mediterranean, olive skin, dark curly hair pulled up in a man bun, tats on his muscular arms. He holds an Uzi in one hand and a small first-aid kit in the other. “Wait! There she is!” He sees her through the window. “Well, hello there.”

  Lilly manages to slide the window open a few inches so that she can be heard. Her voice is hoarse and dry as a rasp. “Do I know you?”

  “No, but you will soon enough.” He gives her a good clean smile, and then notices the outer rings of the horde closing in on them. He puts down his gun and kit, and then reaches up to the train window. “C’mon … we need to get you out of there before we get mobbed. Can you climb?”

  He gently extricates Lilly from the open window of the train car. Grunting painfully, wincing at the pain in her back, she slides herself through the open hatchway and into the rear of the Escalade, flopping down on the carpeted back deck just in time to avoid the unmanageable number of dead pressing in from all directions.

  The SUV booms away in a dust devil of carbon monoxide and debris.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Megan Lafferty’s former home on Delaney Street with its big dormer window in front would never be depicted in Architectural Digest or win any Good Housekeeping awards for interior design, but it was always tidy, it was situated on a tree-lined boulevard, and it cleaned up well. In its heyday, the girls would pull out all the stops at Christmastime. Megan would climb up on the roof and hang multicolored bulbs and set out cardboard reindeer, and Lilly would string tiny white lights along the picket fence that lines the driveway. In the cold winter months, the odor of the landfill abutting their postage-stamp-sized backyard would be kept at bay, and the scent of pine and cinnamon would greet Lilly when she got home from school or work every night, stomping the mud off her boots in the vestibule. It was home for nearly three years while Lilly figured out who she wanted to be when she grew up, and it would always hold a prominent place in her heart. All of which is why she can barely look at the place as the Escalade tops the hill at the corner of Delaney and Sixth and the ruins come into view.

  “Oh Jesus.” Lilly grips the armrest, digging her fingernails into the upholstery. She can’t bear to see the place like this, and yet, for some reason, she can’t take her eyes off it.

  The Escalade sideswipes a pack of walkers milling about the curb, then pulls onto the cracked, weed-whiskered pavement of the driveway. The vehicle shudders to a stop.

  “You gonna be okay?” In the front passenger seat, the olive-skinned man with tattoos shoots a glance over his shoulder at her. His name is Musolino, a Portuguese day laborer from Louisville who lost his family early in the plague. Lilly can tell by the softness behind his eyes that he can probably be trusted. She has gotten to the point where she can see a lot simply by looking behind a person’s eyes. It’s an animal thing—like ferreting out a friend or foe by sniffing the pheromones. “We can meet them someplace else if this is too … whatever.”

  “No … it’s okay. Just gimme a second.” She gazes out the side window at the burned shell of a house, the roof gone, the dormer caved in, the building stripped of every accouterment, from its lampposts to its flower boxes to its garden hose. The place is so devastated by fire and looters that one can gaze straight through its first floor to the overgrown backyard. Huge shards of naked window frames and scorched support beams stick up in the air. The chimney has collapsed into itself and the interior has been decimated, scattered with broken tables, rain-sodden easy chairs, and overturned kitchen appliances. Lilly sees one of her wall hangings—a lithograph of Joni Mitchell from the early 1970s—impaled on a staircase newel post. “Are we early?”

  The driver looks at his watch. “Not at all, they should be here any minute.” An older man, balding, with horn-rimmed glasses, the driver goes by the name Boone. A few minutes ago, he explained to Lilly that he’s the shrink of the group, a former social worker from Jacksonville, Florida, who ended up here in Atlanta after his former survival community in Panama City was overrun.

  “Okay.” Lilly takes a deep breath, bracing herself for the pain in her lower back to return. “I think I’ll try and get out and wait inside.”

  Musolino throws his door open, flicking off the safety on his assault rifle. “We’ll keep watch on the place, keep the walkers at bay.” He opens Lilly’s door. “Just be ready to take off if they swarm up on us again.”

  She gives him a nod as she climbs out. Pain flares in her sacrum as she puts weight on her left leg. She swallows hard, huffing and puffing with effort as she limps awkwardly up the drive to the gaping front door. The screen hangs on its hinges, and it detaches and clatters to the ground when Lilly tries to swing it aside.

  The wind blows through the living room as Lilly crosses the threshold and looks around. She sees the old peach crates in which Megan kept her vinyl—Sabbath, Zeppelin, Metallica, Slipknot, Megadeth, Suicidal Tendencies—now reduced to kindling and splinters of black plastic strewn across the mossy floor. She sees the old grandfather clock Everett had willed to her, lying in pieces in the corner, the guts sprung and spilled. She sees a dozen or more picture frames broken and scattered across the floor. She kneels. She picks up an old, sun-blanched photograph of her father and her with fishing rods and a huge cooler between them as they sit beaming at the camera on the banks of the Chattahoochee River.

  The emotions come on so suddenly, so unexpectedly, they practically knock her over. Tears fill her eyes. She wipes her face and brushes a fingertip across the face of her father. In the picture, the sun is setting behind him, dipping below his beat-up Ford Fairlane. God, Lilly loved that car. She learned to drive in it, and had her first romance in it at the Starline Drive-in. She’s trying to remember the movie that was playing the night that Tommy Klein took her virginity when a voice from behind her snaps her out of her spell.

  “Is that really you?”

  She rises up, pivots around, and stares agape at the figure standing across the ruins of the living room. “Oh my God, I can’t believe it,” she utters and practically leaps across the room, nearly lifting Tommy Dupree out of his boots as she hugs him to her chest. “I can’t believe it … can’t believe it … I just can’t believe it.”

  He grunts. “Easy does it … Jesus … you’re gonna break my walkie-talkie.”

  She holds him at arm’s length so she can get a good look at him. Six months and God knows what else have etched hard experience on his boyish face. Dressed in a chambray shirt with the sleeves cut off, black jeans all gouged and torn, and combat boots, he looks like a miniature version of Lilly. He has a huge Buck knife on one side of his belt, a stainless-steel pistol on the other. She smiles at him through her tears. “I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t sure I would ever see you again.”

  He returns her smile. “I knew I’d see you again, I never doubted it, I just knew it.”

  “You’re looking good, kiddo.” She strokes his hair and notices how well nourished he looks, his skin a healthy ruddy color, his eyes
clear, his body lean but no longer emaciated. He even smells good, like shampoo and deodorant. “What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “We found a place, Lilly. Not far from here. It’s unbelievable.”

  “First, tell me the kids are okay.”

  “They’re better than okay. You’ll see. They’re all safe and sound, and doing great.”

  The sudden drumroll of automatic gunfire cutting down a few walkers across the front yard echoes and makes both Lilly and the boy jump. She lets out a breath and gazes at the two men guarding the front of the house. “How did you hook up with these guys?”

  Tommy nods at the men. “Actually, I wouldn’t be here, wasn’t for them. That day we left the hospital, we got pinned down in the city looking for a safe place. We got surrounded, me and the kids. I thought we were dead meat for sure. But these guys saved us. They’re good guys.”

  She looks at the boy. “How in God’s name did you know about this place?”

  He shrugs. “I know it sounds crazy but we found it in an old phone book, looked up Megan Lafferty. I knew you would get outta that place someday, I knew it. Some of our people, they tried to stage a raid on the hospital and rescue you but it went all to hell. That’s why the place got infested. But even when the walkers took over, I knew you’d get out.” Tommy pauses, clearing his throat. Lilly can see that he’s fighting his own tears. “They told me I couldn’t put the address of the store on the bridge—in the message I left for you—so I figured this was the next best thing. I knew you’d see it one day. We sent search parties almost every day. When the walkers took over the hospital, one of our guys saw you with that old man. Then we lost you for a while.” He wipes his eyes. “But we kept searching, kept coming to this place.”

  She cocks her head at him. “Store? You’re hiding out in a store?”