“That’s good,” April says, giving Penny a wink. “Show him why, honey.”
The little girl grasps her father’s hand and drags him across the roof. “Look, Daddy, me and April made a garden to grow stuff in.”
She shows him a small makeshift planter in the center of the roof. It takes a moment for Philip to realize that the garden is constructed out of four wheelbarrows, their wheels removed, their housings taped together. A six-inch layer of soil fills each of the four cavities, a few unidentified shoots of green already transplanted into each barrow. “This is pretty damn fine,” he says, giving the child a squeeze. He looks at April. “Pretty damn fine.”
“It was Penny’s idea,” April says with a little gleam of pride in her eyes. She points at a row of buckets. “We’re gonna collect the rain, too.”
Philip drinks in April Chalmers’s beautiful, slightly bruised face, her sea-foam blue eyes, her ashy blond hair undone and hanging over the collar of her scroungy cable-knit sweater. He can’t take his eyes off her. And even as Penny starts jabbering happily about all the things she wants to grow—cotton candy plants, bubblegum bushes—Philip cannot help but extrapolate: The way April kneels down next to the child, listening intently with her hand on Penny’s back, the look of affection on the woman’s face, the easy rapport between the two, the sense of connection—all of it suggests something deeper than mere survival.
Philip can barely allow himself to think the word, and yet it comes to him right then, on that windy precipice, in a rush: family.
“Excuse me!”
The gruff voice comes from the fire door behind them, on the other side of the roof. Philip whirls. He sees Tara in one of her stained muumuus and one of her patented moods in the open doorway. She holds a bucket. Her heavily jowled face and Maybelline eyes look even more lined and surly than usual. “Would it be too much to ask for a little help?”
April rises and turns. “I told you I’d help you in a minute.”
Philip can see that Tara has been collecting water from toilet basins. He considers getting in the middle of this but decides against it.
“That was half an hour ago,” Tara says. “Meantime, I been lugging water while you’ve been lollygaggin’ up here in Mr. Rogers’s neighborhood.”
“Tara, just … calm down.” April sighs. “Gimme a second, I’ll be right there.”
“Fine—whatever!” Tara turns in a huff and swishes angrily back down the inner stairs, leaving the sour vibration of contempt in her slipstream.
April looks down. “I’m sorry about that, she’s still dealing with … you know … stuff.”
By the downtrodden expression on April’s face, it’s clear that it would take too much energy for her to run down the litany of what’s needling at her sister. Philip’s no dummy. He knows it’s complicated and it has something to do with jealousy and sibling rivalry, and maybe even the fact that April seems to be going through her grieving period with someone other than Tara.
“No need to apologize,” Philip tells her. “There is somethin’ I want you to know, though.”
“What’s that?”
“Just want you to know how grateful I am, the way you been treatin’ my daughter.”
April smiles. “She’s a great kid.”
“Yes, ma’am … she is … and you ain’t so bad yourself.”
“Why, thank you.” She leans over and gives Philip a peck on the cheek. Nothing fancy, just a quick little kiss. But it makes an impression. “Now I gotta get back before my sister shoots me.”
April walks off, leaving Philip thunderstruck and reeling in the wind.
* * *
As kisses go, it wasn’t anything special. Philip’s late wife, Sarah, had been a blue ribbon kisser. Hell, Philip had encountered prostitutes over the years since Sarah’s death who had given up more in the kissing department. Even hookers have feelings, and Philip would usually ask at the beginning of a session if they would mind terribly if he slipped in a few kisses, just for good measure, just to pretend there was love involved. But this little smooch of April’s is more like hors d’oeuvres, a hint of things to come. Philip wouldn’t call it a tease. Nor would he call it the platonic kind of kiss a sister might give a brother. It exists in that irresistible limbo between two extremes. It is—from Philip’s perspective—a knock on the door, an attempt to see if anyone’s home.
* * *
That afternoon, Philip expects the rain to come but it doesn’t. It’s already mid-October—he has no idea what day it is—and everybody keeps expecting the gulley-washers that traditionally sweep through central Georgia this time of year to roll in, but something keeps them at bay. The temperature is dropping, and the air buzzes with latent moisture, but still the rain doesn’t come. Maybe the drought has something to do with the plague. But for whatever reason, the unsettled sky, with its dark underbelly of storm clouds, seems to reflect the strange, inexplicable tension building in Philip.
Late in the day, he asks April to go with him on a quick trip down the street.
It takes some convincing—despite the fact that the zombie quotient has thinned dramatically since the last time they went out. Philip tells April he needs help scouting the vicinity for a Home Depot or a Lowe’s that might have generators lying around. It’s getting colder and colder, especially at night, and they’re going to need power soon in order to survive. He says he needs somebody who knows the area.
He also tells her that he wants to show her the safe routes Nick has been carving out. Nick offers to go along but Philip says it would be better if he stuck around and kept watch on the place with Brian.
April is up to the task, and is willing to go, but she’s a little dubious about the rickety, homemade catwalk. What if it starts raining when they’re on the ladders? Philip assures her it’s a piece of cake, especially for a little drink of water her size.
They get their coats on and get their weapons ready—April brings along one of the Marlins this time—and they prepare to embark. Tara is seething with anger at them, disgusted by what she calls “a stupid, dangerous, immature, retarded waste of time.” Philip and April politely ignore her.
* * *
“Don’t look down!”
Philip is halfway across the makeshift ladder-bridge over the back alley. April is ten feet behind him, holding on for dear life. Gazing over his shoulder at her, he smiles to himself. Major cojones on this girl.
“I’m cool,” she says, crabbing along with white knuckles and clenched jaw. The wind tousles her hair. Thirty feet beneath her, a pair of moving cadavers dumbly gaze around the air for the source of the voices.
“Almost home free,” Philip urges as he reaches the other side.
She crabs the remaining twenty feet. He helps her down onto the fire-escape landing. The cast-iron grating squeaks under their weight.
They find the open window and slip inside the former home of Stevenson and Sons Accounting and Estate Planning. The office corridors are darker and colder than they were the last time Philip traversed their length. The storm front has brought dusk to the area earlier than usual tonight.
They cross the empty hallways. “Don’t worry,” Philip assures her as they crunch across debris and crumpled tax returns, “This place is as safe as you can get, this day and age.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” she says, cradling the shotgun, thumbing the hammer nervously.
Dressed in tattered fleece and jeans, April has her arms and lower legs wrapped with gaffer’s tape. Nobody else does this. Philip asked her about it once and she told him she saw an animal trainer do it on TV—a last-resort defense against a bite breaking the skin.
They cross the lobby and find the access stairs just past the ruined vending machines.
“Get a load of this,” Philip says as he leads her up the single flight to the unmarked door. He pauses before opening the door. “You remember Captain Nemo?”
“Who?”
“That old flick Twenty Thousand Leagues Und
er the Sea? That old loony captain, playing his organ in that submarine, while the giant squids swim across them big picture windows?”
“Never saw it.”
Philip smiles at her. “Well, you’re about to.”
* * *
The last thing April Chalmers expects is for something other than horrific violence to take her breath away, but that’s pretty much what happens when she follows Philip through the unmarked door and onto the pedestrian bridge. She pauses on the threshold and just stares.
She’s been in these urban breezeways before—maybe even this very bridge—but somehow, tonight, the gauzy light and space of the thing, as it stretches across the intersection, thirty feet above the streets, connecting up with the second floor of Dillard’s, seems almost miraculous. Through the glass roof, veins of lightning flicker and thread across the storm clouds. Through the transparent walls, the darkening shadows of the city teem with wandering zombies. Atlanta looks like a vast game board in chaotic disarray.
“I see what you mean,” she says. Her voice comes out in a murmur, as she takes it all in, feeling a weird mixture of emotions—giddiness, fear, excitement.
Philip strolls down the center of the bridge, pausing by one wall and shrugging off the straps of his duffel bag. He nods to the south. “Want you to see something,” he says. “C’mere.”
She joins him, putting down her shotgun and backpack against the glass wall.
Philip points out the marks on the abandoned vehicles and doorways left by Nick Parsons. Philip explains the theory of “safe zones” and he talks about how cunning Nick has become. “I think he’s got something really good going here,” Philip concludes.
April agrees. “We could use those hiding places when we find that generator everybody’s talking about.”
“You got that right, sister.”
“Nick’s a good guy.”
“That he is.”
The encroaching darkness is drawing down over the city, and in the bluish shadows of the bridgeway, Philip’s rugged face looks even craggier to April than usual. With his inky black Fu Manchu whiskers and dark eyes nested in laugh lines, he reminds April of a cross between a young Clint Eastwood and … who? Her dad as a young man? Is that why she’s feeling these twinges of attraction toward the big, lanky redneck? Is April so retarded that she’s attracted to a man just because he’s the doppelgänger of her father? Or does this pathetic puppy love have something to do with the stress of fighting to survive in a world suddenly doomed with extinction? This is the guy who cracked open her daddy’s skull, for God’s sake. But maybe that’s unfair. That was not David Chalmers back there. Her daddy’s spirit, as the song goes, had flown away. His soul had departed long before he climbed out of his bed and tried to make a meal out of his eldest daughter.
“I gotta tell you,” Philip is saying, gazing out at the ragged figures, like stray dogs, roaming the streets for scraps. “We get a few things in place, and we could stay for a long time in that apartment building.”
“I think you’re right. All we gotta do is figure out a way to slip some Valium into Tara’s oatmeal.”
Philip laughs—a good, clean laugh—which shows a side of him that April has not yet seen. He looks at her. “We got an opportunity here, we can make this work. We can do more than just survive. And I’m not just talking about getting a generator.”
April looks up into his eyes. “Whaddaya mean?”
He turns toward her. “Met a lotta girls in my day, ain’t never run across one quite like you. Tough as nails … but the tenderness you show toward my kid? Never seen Penny take to somebody like she’s taken to you. Hell, you saved our asses, pulling us off the streets. You’re a very special lady, you know that?”
All at once April feels her skin flush hot with chills, and her midsection weaken, and she realizes Philip is looking at her in a new way. His eyes shimmer with emotion. She knows now that he’s been thinking the same thing that she has. She looks down, embarrassed. “Your standards must be low,” she mutters.
He reaches out and gently puts one of his big, callused workman’s hands on the curve of her jaw. “I got the highest standards of anybody I know.”
A clap of thunder booms outside the glass, rattling the bridge and making April jump.
Philip kisses her on the lips.
She pulls back. “I don’t know, Philip … I mean … I don’t know if this is … you know.”
Second thoughts and third thoughts and fourth thoughts flow through April in the space of an instant. If she takes this to the next level, what will happen with Tara? How will it fuck up the dynamics at the apartment? How will it complicate things? How will it affect their safety, their chances of survival, their future (if they even have one)?
Philip’s expression brings her back—the way he’s looking at her, his gaze almost glassy with emotion, his mouth slack with desire.
He leans in and kisses her again, and this time she finds herself putting her arms around him and returning the kiss, and she doesn’t even notice the droplets of rain beginning to ping off the glass over her head.
She feels her body go limp in Philip’s forceful embrace. Their lips part, and electricity flows through April as they explore each other with their tongues, the taste of coffee and spearmint gum and Philip’s musky odor filling her senses. Her nipples harden under her sweater.
A flash of blue lightning turns the dusk to brilliant silver daylight.
April loses track of herself. She loses track of everything. Her head is spinning. She doesn’t notice the rain slapping against the glass roof. She doesn’t even notice the fact that Philip is gently lowering both of them to the floor of the walkway. Their lips locked and working sensually, Philip’s big hands caressing April’s breasts, he carefully lays her back against the glass wall, and before April knows what is happening, he is on top of her.
The storm unleashes its fury. The rain comes down now in sheets against the roof. Thunder rolls and lightning crackles and sparks like static electricity in the anxious air as Philip fumbles April’s sweater up across her bare midriff, exposing her bra in the blue light.
Gnarled fingers wrestle open belt buckles. Thunder booms. April feels the urgent nudge of Philip’s loins burrowing between her legs. Lightning flickers. Her jeans are halfway down her legs, her breasts free now.
The edge of a fingernail brushes her belly, and all at once, like a switch flipping inside her—accompanied by a single volley of thunder—she thinks, WAIT.
BOOOOOOOM!
WAIT!
* * *
A tidal wave of desire carries Philip Blake off on its roaring currents.
He can barely hear April’s voice coming from somewhere far away, telling him to Stop, wait, hold on, listen, listen, this is too much, I’m not ready for this, please, please, stop right now, stop. None of it registers in Philip’s brain as it swims with lust and passion and pain and loneliness and a desperate need to feel something, because now his entire being is wired to his groin, all his pent-up emotion coursing through him.
“God, I’m begging you to stop!” the faraway voice pleads, April’s body stiffening.
Philip rides the writhing woman beneath him as if surfing a pipeline of white noise, knowing that she secretly wants him, loves him, despite what she’s saying. So, he keeps shoving himself into her, again and again, in great magnesium-bright flashes of lightning and raw energy, filling her, taking her, nourishing her, transforming her, until she goes limp beneath him, limp and silent now.
The soft white explosion of pleasure erupts like a skyrocket launching inside Philip.
He slides off her, landing on the floor next to her, staring straight up at the rain—momentarily oblivious to the shadowy, desecrated souls thirty feet below them, captured in the flicker-show of lightning like monstrous figures in a silent movie.
* * *
Philip takes April’s silence as a sign that maybe, just maybe, everything’s going to be okay. As the storm settles into a
steady deluge, its muffled jet-engine roar filling the walkway, the two of them pull their clothes back on and lie there side by side for a long time, not saying a word, staring up at the strafing sheets of rain crashing off the glass roof.
Philip is in a state of shock, his heart racing, his skin clammy and cold. He feels like a broken mirror, as if a shard of his own soul has fractured off and reflected back the face of a monster. What did he just do? He knows he did something wrong. But it almost feels like somebody else did it.
“Got a little carried away there,” he says at last, after many minutes of terrible silence.
She doesn’t say a word. He glances over at her, and sees her face in the darkness, reflecting the liquid shadows of rain streaming down the sides of the glass walkway. She looks semiconscious. Like she’s having a waking dream.
“Sorry about that,” he says, the words sounding tinny and hollow in his own ears. He shoots another glance at her, trying to gauge her mood. “You okay?”
“Yes.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
Her voice has a mechanical quality to it, completely colorless, barely audible above the noise of the rain. Philip is about to say something else when a volley of thunder interrupts his thought. The rumbling reverberates through the iron framework of the walkway, a teeth-rattling vibration that makes Philip cringe.
“April?”
“Yes.”
“We ought to get back.”
* * *
The return trip is shrouded in silence. Philip walks a few paces behind April through the deserted lobby, up a staircase, and down the empty, litter-strewn corridors. Every now and then, Philip considers saying something, but he doesn’t. He figures it’s probably best to let it ride right now. Let her work through it. Anything Philip says might make it worse. April walks ahead of him with the shotgun on her shoulder, looking like a tired soldier returning from a rough patrol. They reach the top floor of the accounting firm and find the gaping window, the rain blowing in past jagged, broken glass. Only a few words are spoken—“You go first” and “Watch your step”—as Philip helps her climb out and cross the rain-swept fire escape. The pounding wind and rain that lashes down on them as they shimmy across the treacherous makeshift catwalk almost feels good to Philip. It braces him and wakes him up and gives him hope that maybe he can repair whatever damage has been done here tonight with this woman.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 19
