She turns and walks out the inner door, which leads to the adjacent trailer.
The Stacks just stand there for a moment, dripping on the floor like wet rats, looking around the airless little camper with its ancient canned goods and old issues of Us Weekly. Outside, the rain drones on, hammering on the enclosure’s roof. Back still aching, John rubs the bump on his head as Jennifer leads her oldest daughter over to a cot by the draped window, carefully lowering the girl to the bed, careful not to bang her head on the low shelf. The girl lies back, still staring emptily. Jennifer goes to the pantry for towels.
Across the room, Kourtney says, “I’m sorry but what the fuck?”
John looks at her, not responding but turning things over and over in his mind. He takes a towel from his wife and starts to dry off, still marveling at this bizarre turn of events. Less than thirty minutes ago, they were homeless, adrift in the most dangerous, walker-infested countryside in the South, and now they’re in a place with houseplants. Part of him wants to wait and see what happens next, but another part of him wants to run screaming from this place.
“You know what this place is?” Jennifer’s voice cuts through his thoughts and tugs at his attention. She stands next to him, a grave look on her face. “It’s a goddamn prison.”
Before John can respond, a voice comes from the inner doorway.
“We prefer to think of it as protective custody.” Spencer-Lee Dryden stands in the archway, watching them with a convivial smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. He stands next to his wife, holding her hand, the two of them looking like a sinister couple at the top of a sinister wedding cake. “Look. You folks are exhausted. Who wouldn’t be? Why don’t you make yourselves at home, we’ll have a good talk later.”
He gives a nod, as though the subject is closed, and then turns and ushers Sally back the way they came, closing the door behind them, the lock making a loud, resounding, final click … locking the Stack family in their new home.
* * *
Not long after the Drydens have made their departure, John Stack hears the muffled sounds of another family in the trailer in front of them, and curiosity gets the better of him. He squeezes past a stack of supply crates and peers through a narrow window in the front of his enclosure—a firewall that used to be a bunk window—and he sees three children and one adult.
At first, nothing about these people strikes John as extraordinary, most of them dressed in those odd work shirts and uniform pants that look like they were cribbed from a bowling team or a school for budding repairmen. The children all appear to be middle-school age, and mostly content, maybe even drugged, it’s hard to tell. They sit languidly reading books or drawing with crayons. But then John’s gaze falls on the lone adult sitting off by herself on the floor in the corner of the trailer.
Something about the way the woman is sitting there is troubling to John but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Rawboned, lanky, with a swimmer’s physique, she sits Indian-style in her work uniform, her legs interlaced, head down, brow furrowed in thought. She has short, dark, razor-cut hair, and a patrician face that conjures images of Ivy League schools and East Coast money.
But the way she sits there, tapping a spoon on the floor, deep in thought, her intelligent eyes shifting around the chamber, tells John Stack there is a lot more going on here than a mother of three trying to decide what to cook for dinner tonight.
Turning back to his own family, John Stack feels his skull throbbing with pain, his stomach clenching with panic. He sees his wife sitting on the edge of Kayla’s cot, pressing a cold rag to the injured girl’s head. He sees his youngest daughter over by the window, gazing out like a caged animal. He realizes not a single one of them has made a move toward the clean clothes or the cooler or the water dispenser on the counter or any of the amenities.
John Stack can feel the tension twisting in his gut. He knows this feeling well. He has felt it many times over the past few years. It is the genetic memory stewing in him that some call fight or flight—that silent warning going off inside a person when danger is on the horizon. He feels it now in his gorge like a fist. Something terrible is about to happen.
He turns back to the narrow window, gazes down at the woman in the first trailer, and wonders if she has anything to do with these feelings.
* * *
Hunkered down on the trailer’s floor, reviewing her plan over and over, trying to ferret out the flaws, the stumbling blocks, the ways things could go wrong, Ashley Lynn Duart watches her adopted kids out of the corner of her eyes. The children seem docile enough tonight. Little do they know what is in store for them. They are the weakest links in her plan, but there is nothing Ash can do about that now.
She rises to her full height—nearly six feet—and brushes the top of her head against the trailer’s ceiling. Clad in an XXL Dickies shirt, cinched at the waist with a leather belt, the name GARY stitched on its pocket, she puts on a happy face for the children and announces, “Think I’m gonna make us some macaroni and cheese for dinner tonight.”
They all think this is a pretty good idea, so Ash starts pulling out the camp stove and pots from their storage cabinets. She pours the water and drops the pasta and lights the Sterno can under the saucepan, silently reviewing her plan, agonizing over every detail. She secretly reaches under the counter and feels for the road flare she has hidden there, the twelve-inch-long stick taped to the underside of the tiny sink. She brushes her fingertips across it, reassuring herself, girding herself.
It was the only item even remotely close to a weapon that Ash had been able to smuggle into the prison camp when her and Quinn’s kids had been kidnapped from the fields outside Haralson last month. She had hidden the twelve-inch stick of potassium nitrate, sulfur, sawdust, and wax down the back of her pants, and now she knows it represents her only chance of escape from this madhouse.
Her one last card to play.
Tonight.
THREE
Lilly Caul works throughout the afternoon and early evening, her head pounding, her joints aching.
With Tommy Dupree at her side, she hauls two portable generators down from the second floor and loads them onto the back of a modified pickup truck. The front end of the rig has been severed off at the windshield, the greasy, exposed chassis in front now acting as braces for a team of two horses. Lilly and Tommy will go it alone in this Frankenstein’s monster of a conveyance. After pleading, cajoling, threatening, and bargaining with the others, Lilly failed to convince anybody else to join her. Now she has no choice but to go ahead and take off without them. It’s still a free country, and with Tommy’s help she believes she can make it back to Woodbury and start over. The plan is to return for the children when the town is rendered safe.
All of which is fueling her with adrenaline right now as she fills the pickup’s cargo bay with treasures from the store. Over the next hour, they bring down cartons of freeze-dried entrees from the cafeteria, solar cell lamps, kitchen utensils, cartons of granola, blankets, outdoor solar showers, garden implements, seed packets, lightbulbs, storage boxes, portable grills, charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid, potted plants, growing soil, juice boxes, jars of pickled vegetables, batteries, battery chargers, pillows, backpacks, and half a dozen shrink-wrapped cartons of bottled water.
By midnight, the makeshift horse-wagon is so laden with weight the rear tires have practically flattened out against the cement deck of the parking garage. Lilly and Tommy secure the cargo with bungee cords and rope, and then go fetch the horses.
The group’s official horse wrangler, Burt Stankowski, grew up on a farm in Virginia. A year ago, he acquired two sturdy draft horses in trade for his ailing eighteen-wheeler, and a few months later, he picked up a stallion and a mare from an abandoned dairy farm outside of Macon. The mare has already had two foals and is expected to have more. In addition to these six horses, they have the three that Musolino and Boone brought in when they joined the group.
Now all the animals hunker tog
ether in the makeshift stable at one end of the garage, shuffling through the shredded paper that doubles as hay, nickering nervously at the occasional volley of thunder that rattles the ground floor above them. Lilly and Tommy approach cautiously. The animals seem nervous. Lilly whispers, “Go easy, Tommy. Storm’s got them a little jumpy.”
They untie the two draft horses, and then lead them back across the cluttered garage.
“Holy shit,” Tommy Dupree comments as he returns to the modified pickup. He comes to an abrupt halt, the horse tossing its head and whinnying. Tommy stares. He doesn’t move.
Lilly pauses in front of the pickup, speechless, holding the horse by the lead and staring at the twelve figures gathered around the pickup wagon. “What’s going on?” she asks them.
“We took a vote,” Musolino tells her. Clad in an army surplus raincoat, a pair of ammo bandoliers slung over his broad shoulders, he glances at the others. Most of them are looking down at the floor with embarrassed smiles as if sharing a private joke. Norma Sutters just shakes her head with wry amusement and glances at Eve Betts, who grins at Boone, who grins at Stankowski. They’re all dressed in rain gear. Some of them carry duffel bags. Even the children are bundled up in raincoats with their adorable little knapsacks slung across their backs. Musolino smiles at Lilly. “We decided life would be too boring without you around here to bust our balls.”
Lilly looks at Tommy, and Tommy giggles. Lilly is about to say something else when she notices Sophie Leland standing in the back, holding the baby, looking earnest and brave. Three of the teenagers—Connie, Bradley, and Lyle—stand behind her, gun belts and bandoliers weighing down their emaciated bodies, causing their shoulders to stoop. Lilly sees all the downturned faces around her, feels the awkward silence, and instantly understands what’s going on.
“None of you are wearing raincoats,” Lilly says to the group huddling against the back wall. She speaks softly, deferentially.
The former prostitute smiles sadly but doesn’t yet look up at Lilly. “Yeah … well.” Then Sophie looks up through wet eyes. “I think me and Doe are gonna be safer staying behind. The kids will watch over us.” She gestures toward the heavily armed teenagers. “When you get situated down there, and everything is cool, you can come back for us.”
Lilly processes this for a moment. “Okay. Um. Are you sure about this?”
Sophie nods. “Yeah, actually, I am. I think this is the safest bet for the baby. We’ll be fine. We got that whole walk-in full of freeze-dried food. And Connie and Brad have a wheelbarrow full of bullets.”
“All right … I get what you’re saying. I just want to make sure you’re cool with this.”
“I am. We got enough powdered milk to last Doe into her teens. And we can all stay on the third floor indefinitely. We’ll be fine.”
Lilly ponders the lithe little woman and her wan, slender face. Along one side of the woman’s swan-like neck is a jailhouse tattoo of a spiderweb. A ropy scar of indeterminate origins winds down one arm like a seam in her flesh. The fingers of her left hand—the one currently holding the pacifier—are each adorned with a letter, together spelling the word L-I-V-E. Along the inside of one forearm is the phrase Don’t Judge Me.
Right then, Lilly realizes all the hard miles that this waiflike former streetwalker has traveled, and she concludes if there’s anybody who could survive in this place with a baby, a gaggle of unruly teenagers, and a million square feet of home furnishings, it’s Sophie Leland.
At last, Lilly gives Sophie a forlorn smile and says, “If you’re absolutely sure this is what you want to do.”
“I am, Lilly. Don’t worry about us. Doe will take care of all of us.”
Lilly grins. “I believe she will.” Lilly pulls the woman and the baby into a warm embrace, gently stroking the child’s silky hair. Lilly can smell that unmistakable powdery fragrance of baby, and it makes her eyes water with emotion. She steps back. “Good luck, sweetie.”
“Thanks.” Sophie takes a deep breath. “Same back at you.”
With a nod, Lilly turns and looks at the group of stalwart friends standing before her with earnest expressions. The tears well up in her eyes. She wipes them. “Never a dull moment with you people,” she finally says.
* * *
That night, out in the rain-lashed farmland, in a warren of interconnected trailers occupying a backwoods meadow, a big man reclines on a sofa in the largest trailer, a gaggle of children snuggled around him, some of them sucking their thumbs, others beginning to drift off as the man’s baritone voice renders an O. Henry story from memory. “And the beautiful young bride presents the handsome young husband with the gorgeous watch chain,” Spencer-Lee Dryden softly utters, “for which she sold her lovely blond hair.”
He speaks in the rolling drawl of down-water Louisiana, stretching the words into luhhhv-lee blahhhhnd hayyyyahh, which only adds to the hypnotic quality of his voice. Lying back on a heap of feather pillows, his shirt unbuttoned to reveal his graying chest hair, he resembles a land baron or a king lounging in his castle, surrounded by his tiny subjects, his heirs. He has a faint smile on his boyish face, warm and cozy in the knowledge that his palace guards are, at this very moment, out in the rain, patrolling the borders of his encampment, keeping the wolves at bay. And King Spencer-Lee the First is free to revel in his happy place, his passion, his obsession: family.
Spencer-Lee grew up in Slidell, helping his dad deliver kegs of Dixie beer to bars and taverns across the bayous and backwaters. He learned the hardscrabble wholesale liquor business with his bare fists and street sense, which ultimately landed him in the wild and woolly world of Georgia politics. But it was the loss of his entire family in a terrible house fire when he was away at school in Alabama that truly shaped him as a person. He had rushed home the day after and had to identify the bodies at the city morgue in Montgomery. Seeing those woeful, charred remains of his dear mother, his pop, and his brother Willy laid out on those slabs changed him. He would suffer the invisible scars of that day the rest of his life.
That autumn he met his sweet Sally, then a coed at the U of A, and married her the following spring, and he never looked back. Even when he and his wife were told they could never have children, he went on secretly believing that his family would one day blossom.
“And the handsome young husband presents a beautiful golden comb to the young bride,” he goes on in his honey-sweet basso profundo purr. “For which he sold his watch. But neither useless gift could match the love they had for each other, for God, for country, and for the most important thing of all: family.”
This last part he completely invents on the spot, punctuating the final sentence of his tale with a kiss on each downy-soft head of each child. Sally materializes in the shadows near the door, as if on cue, and Spencer-Lee gently lifts the slumbering children—one at a time—from his sofa, handing them over to the matriarch. With a wink and a little grin, she carries each child back down the long corridor of trailers to their respective quarters.
Spencer-Lee washes up, brushes his teeth, and retires to his private bedroom. He peers through the slatted blinds at the rain-scourged woods outside. In the intermittent lightning, he can see his men surrounding a moving corpse on the edge of the forest. It’s a large male with some age on it, its innards hanging out of its ruptured midsection. The light flickers again and Spencer-Lee sees one of the guards drive a crowbar through the creature’s skull.
The body is dragged away and disposed of, and the quiet drone of rain returns.
The big man lies back on his bed, clad only in his boxer shorts. He turns off the oil lantern and lets his mind wander. The sound of the rain on the trailers’ rooftops is calming. He is about to drift off when the faint voice of his wife stirs him. “I love that story,” she says, climbing into bed with him, still garbed in her work shirt. “The way they each sell the very thing the other one is accessorizing.”
They kiss. Spencer-Lee chuckles. “‘Accessorizing’ … I like that.”
Her hand goes down to his groin, awakening him further, their mouths opening, tongues exploring and flicking. They begin to make love, longtime partners, each with an intimate knowledge of the other’s zones and quirks. Sally’s shirt falls open as she lies on her back. Spencer-Lee pulls the shirt off her and tosses it on the floor, the strange pocket patch—YOUR NAME HERE—still visible in the low light.
The work shirts had been Spencer-Lee’s idea. A couple years ago, he found an entire warehouse full of them, and he realized they would help him keep track of the inhabitants of his symbolic ark. The “guests” in his little hermetically sealed compound would wear the frumpy, utilitarian uniforms as a sort of nod to community, to family, to democratic ideals. The guards would be better able to identify residents in the event of an emergency, and the uniformity of it all would lend a kind of utopian quality to the place. Sure, at times, the work clothes can give off an air of the penitentiary, and the irony of false name patches on the breast pockets of plague refugees is not lost on Spencer-Lee. But on the whole, the Dickies cast-offs have worked out well.
Now, Spencer-Lee and Sally build up a rhythm, faster and faster.
They are about to climax when the shadow of a third figure crosses the room.
It happens so fast, neither Sally nor Spencer-Lee notices the shadow moving to the bedside table and grasping the leather sap before it’s too late. The sap comes down hard on the back of Spencer-Lee’s skull. It makes a sound like a broken bell in his ears, a shooting star of pain flashing across his field of vision.
He flops backward onto the floor, and begins to gag on his own saliva.
The passage of time seems to slow down as Spencer-Lee wavers in and out of consciousness. He can barely see the tall, feminine figure slamming the sap down on Sally’s head, knocking her unconscious, then tying her wrists to the headboard, gagging her with a length of fabric. Then, in a flickering burst of lightning, he sees the assailant’s face. At first, he doesn’t recognize the woman. But then, in a second flash of ambient light, he realizes it’s the Ashley Duart woman—better known as Ash—the stuck-up blueblood from Haralson.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 6
