By the third day, Nick realizes that most of the radio dial is static, most of basic cable is snow, and the Wi-Fi in the house is gone. No dial-up connections are working, and the regular phone calls Nick has been making to emergency numbers—which, up to this point, have all played back recordings—are now sending back the classic “fuck you” from the phone company: The number you have dialed is not available at this time, please try again later.
By late morning that day, the sky clouds over.
In the afternoon, a dismal, chill mist falls on the community, and everybody huddles indoors, trying to ignore the fact that there’s a fine line between being safe and being a prisoner. Other than Nick, most of them are tired of talking about Atlanta. Atlanta seems farther away now—as if the more they ponder the twenty-some miles between Wiltshire and the city, the more impassable they seem.
That night, after everybody drifts off to sleep, Philip sits his lonely vigil in the living room next to a slumbering Penny.
The mist has deteriorated into full-blown thunder and lightning.
Philip pokes a finger between two shutter slats, and he peers out into the darkness. Through the gap, he can see—over the top of the barricade—the winding side streets and massive shadows of live oaks, their branches bending in the wind.
Lightning flickers.
Two hundred yards away, a dozen or so humanoid shapes materialize in the strobe light, moving aimlessly through the rain.
It’s hard to tell for sure from Philip’s vantage point, but it looks as though the things might be moving—in their leaden, retarded fashion, like stroke victims—this way. Do they smell fresh meat? Did the noises of human activity draw them out? Or are they simply lumbering around randomly like ghastly goldfish in a bowl?
Right then, for the first time since they arrived at Wiltshire Estates, Philip Blake begins to wonder if their days in this womb of wall-to-wall carpet and overstuffed sofas are numbered.
* * *
The fourth day dawns cold and overcast. The pewter-colored sky hangs low over the wet lawns and abandoned homes. Although the occasion goes unspoken, the new day marks a milestone of sorts: the beginning of the plague’s second week.
Now Philip stands with his coffee in the living room, peering out through the shutters at the jury-rigged barricade. In the pale morning light, he can see the northeast corner of the fence shuddering and trembling. “Son of a buck,” he mutters under his breath.
“What’s the matter?” Brian’s voice snaps Philip out of his stupor.
“There’s more of ’em.”
“Shit. How many?”
“Can’t tell.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Bobby!”
The big man trundles into the living room in his sweatpants and bare feet, eating a banana. Philip turns to his portly pal and says, “Get dressed.”
Bobby swallows a mouthful of banana. “What’s going on?”
Philip ignores the question, looks at Brian. “Keep Penny in the family room.”
“Will do,” Brian says, and hurries off.
Philip starts toward the stairs, calling out as he goes: “Get the nail gun and as many extension cords as you can carry … hatchets, too!”
* * *
FFFFFFFOOOMP! Number five goes down like a giant rag doll in tattered suit pants, the dead, milky eyes rolling back in its head as it slides down the other side of the fence, its putrid body collapsing to the parkway. Philip steps back, breathing hard from the exertion, damp with sweat in his denim jacket and jeans.
Numbers one through four had been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel—one female and three males—all of whom Philip had sneaked up on with the nail gun as they bumped and clawed against the weak spot at the fence’s corner. At that point, all Philip had to do was stand on the bottom strut with a good angle on the tops of their heads. He put them down quickly, one after another: FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP! FFFFOOOMP!
Number five had been slippery. Inadvertently jerking out of the line of fire at the last moment, it did a little intoxicated shuffle, then craned its neck upward at Philip, jaws snapping. Philip had to waste two nails—both of which ricocheted off the sidewalk—before he finally sent one home into the suit-wearing asshole’s cerebral cortex.
Now Philip catches his breath, doubled over with exhaustion, the nail gun still in his right hand, still plugged into the house with four twenty-five-foot cords. He straightens up and listens. The front parkway is silent now. The fence is still.
Glancing over his shoulder, Philip sees Bobby Marsh in the backyard, about a hundred feet away. The big man is sitting on his fat ass, trying to catch his breath, leaning against a small abandoned doghouse. The doghouse has a little shingle roof and the word LADDIE BOY mounted above the opening at one end.
These rich people and their fucking dogs, Philip thinks ruefully, still a little manic and wired. Probably fed that thing better than most kids.
Over the back fence, about twenty feet away from Bobby, the limp remains of a dead woman are draped over the crest, a hatchet still buried in her skull where Bobby Marsh put out her lights.
Philip gives Bobby a wave and a hard, questioning look: Everything cool?
Bobby returns the gesture with a thumbs-up.
Then … almost without warning … things begin happening very quickly.
* * *
The first indication that something is decidedly not cool occurs within a split second of Bobby signaling the thumbs-up sign to his friend and leader and mentor. Drenched in sweat, his heart still pumping with the burden of his huge girth as he sits leaning against the doghouse, Bobby manages to accompany the thumbs-up signal with a smile … completely oblivious to the muffled noise coming from inside the doghouse.
For years now, Bobby Marsh has secretly yearned to please Philip Blake, and the prospects of giving Philip the thumbs-up after a messy job well done fills Bobby with a weird kind of satisfaction.
An only child, barely able to make it out of high school, Bobby clung to Philip in the years before Sarah Blake had died, and after that—after Philip had drifted away from his drinking buddies—Bobby had desperately tried to reconnect. Bobby called Philip too many times; Bobby talked too much when they were together; and Bobby often made a fool of himself trying to keep up with the wiry, alpha dog of a ringleader. But now, in a strange way, Bobby feels as though this bizarre epidemic has—among other things—given Bobby a way to bond again with Philip.
All of which is probably why, at first, Bobby doesn’t hear the noise inside the doghouse.
When the thump comes—as if a giant heart were beating inside the little miniature shack—Bobby’s smile freezes on his face, and his upturned thumb falls to his side. And by the time the realization that there’s something inside the doghouse—something moving—manages to travel the synapses of Bobby’s brain and register plainly enough for him to move, it’s already too late.
Something small and low to the ground bursts out of the doghouse’s arched opening.
* * *
Philip is already halfway across the yard, running at a full sprint, when it becomes clear that the thing that has just thrust its way out of the doghouse is a tiny human being—or at least a rotting, bluish, contorted facsimile of a tiny human being—with leaves and dog shit in its filthy, matted blond bangs, and chains tangled around its waist and legs.
“F-FUH-FFUHHHHK!” Bobby yelps and jerks back away from the twelve-year-old corpse as the thing that was once a boy now pounces on Bobby’s ham-hock-sized leg.
Bobby tumbles sideways, ripping his leg free in the nick of time, just as the little contorted face—like a sunken gourd with hollow cavities for eyes—gobbles the grass where Bobby’s leg had been one millisecond earlier.
Philip is now fifty feet away, charging toward the doghouse at top speed, raising the nail gun like a divining rod aimed at the miniature monster. Bobby crawls crablike through the damp grass, his ass crack showing pathetically, his gasps h
igh and shrill like those of a little girl.
The pint-sized fiend moves with the graceless energy of a tarantula, scuttling across the grass toward Bobby. The fat man tries to struggle to his feet and run, but his legs get tangled and he tumbles again, backward this time.
Philip is twenty feet away when Bobby starts shrieking in a higher register. The zombie child has hooked a clawlike hand around Bobby’s ankle, and before Bobby can wrest his leg away from the thing, it sinks a mouthful of putrefying teeth into Bobby’s leg.
“GODDAMNIT!” Philip booms as he approaches with the nail gun.
A hundred feet behind him, the extension cord pulls free of the outlet.
Philip slams the tip of the nail gun down on the back of the thing’s skull as the monster latches on to Bobby’s quivering, fat body.
The nail gun trigger clicks. Nothing happens. The zombie burrows down into Bobby’s flaccid thigh, piranhalike, breaching his femoral artery and taking half his scrotum with it. Bobby’s scream deteriorates into a ululating howl as Philip instinctively tosses the gun aside, then lurches at the beast. He tears the thing off his friend as though removing a giant leech and heaves it—head over heels—across the lawn before it has a chance to take another bite.
The dead child flops and rolls twenty feet across the muddy grass.
Nick and Brian burst out of the house, Brian grabbing for the extension cord, Nick roaring across the lawn with a pickaxe. Philip grabs Bobby and tries to stop him from squirming and screaming, because the extra exertion is making the big man hemorrhage faster, the ragged wound already sending up geysers of blood in rhythm with Bobby’s quickening pulse. Philip slams his hand down on Bobby’s leg, stanching the flow slightly, the blood oozing between Philip’s greasy fingers, as other figures move across Philip’s peripheral vision. The dead thing is crawling back across the moist ground toward Philip and Bobby, and Nick does not hesitate, approaching at a sprint, raising the axe, eyes wide with panic and rage. The axe sings through the air, the rusty point coming down on the back of the zombie-child’s skull, sinking three inches into the cranial cavity. The monster deflates. Philip screams up at Nick something about a belt, a BELT, and now Nick is hovering, fumbling for his belt. Philip has no formal training in first aid but he knows enough to try and stop the bleeding with some kind of tourniquet. He wraps Nick’s belt around the shivering fat man’s leg, and Bobby is trying to talk again but he looks like a man experiencing extreme cold, his lips moving, quivering silently. Meantime—as all this is going on—Brian is a hundred feet away, plugging the extension cord back in the outlet, probably because it’s all he can think of doing. The nail gun lies in the grass fifteen feet behind Philip. At this point, Philip is shouting at Nick to GO GET SOME FUCKING BANDAGES AND ALCOHOL AND WHATEVER!!! Nick hurries off, still carrying the pickaxe, while Brian approaches, staring at the dead thing lying facedown in the grass, its skull stoved in. Brian gives it a wide berth. He picks up the nail gun—just in case—and he scans the hill behind the back fence as Philip now holds Bobby in his arms like a giant baby. Bobby is crying, breathing quick, shallow, rattling breaths. Philip comforts his friend, murmuring encouragement and assuring him that it’s all going to be okay … but it’s clear, as Brian cautiously approaches, that things are definitely not going to be okay.
* * *
Moments later, Nick returns with an armful of large sterile cotton bandages from inside, as well as a plastic bottle of alcohol in one back pocket and a roll of cotton tape in the other. But something has changed. The emergency has transformed into something darker—a deathwatch.
“We gotta get him inside,” Philip announces, now soaked in his friend’s blood. But Philip makes no effort to lift the fat man. Bobby Marsh is going to die. That much is clear to all of them.
It’s especially clear to Bobby Marsh, who now lies in a state of shock, staring up at the gunmetal sky, struggling to speak.
Brian stands nearby, holding the nail gun at his side, staring down at Bobby. Nick drops the bandages. He lets out an anguished breath. He looks as though he might start to cry, but instead he simply drops to his knees on the other side of Bobby and hangs his head.
“I—I—n-n-nn—” Bobby Marsh tries desperately to get Philip to understand something.
“Sssshhhhh…” Philip strokes the man’s shoulder. Philip cannot think straight. He turns, grabs a roll of bandages, and starts dressing the wound.
“Nnn-n-NO!” Bobby pushes the bandage away.
“Bobby, goddamnit.”
“NN-NO!”
Philip stops, swallows hard, looks into the watery eyes of the dying man. “It’s gonna be okay,” Philip says, his voice changing.
“N-no—it ain’t,” Bobby manages. Somewhere way up in the sky, a crow yammers. Bobby knows what’s going to happen. They saw a man in a ditch back in Covington come back in less than ten minutes. “S-ss-stop saying that, Philly.”
“Bobby—”
“It’s over,” Bobby manages in a feeble whisper, and his eyes roll back for a moment. Then he sees the nail gun in Brian’s hand. With his big bloody sausage fingers, Bobby reaches for the muzzle.
Brian drops the gun with a start.
“Goddamnit, we gotta get him inside!” Philip’s voice is laced with hopelessness as Bobby Marsh blindly reaches for the nail gun. He gets his fat hand around the pointed barrel and tries to lift it to his temple.
“Jesus Christ,” Nick utters.
“Get that thing away from him!” Philip waves Brian away from the victim.
Bobby’s tears track down the sides of his huge head, cleansing the blood in streaks. “P-please, Philly,” Bobby murmurs. “J-just … do it.”
Philip stands up. “Nick!—C’mere!” Philip turns and walks a few paces toward the house.
Nick rises to his feet and joins Philip. The two men stand fifteen feet away from Bobby, out of earshot, their backs turned, their voices low and strained.
“We gotta cut him,” Philip says quickly.
“We gotta what?”
“Amputate his leg.”
“What!”
“Before the sickness spreads.”
“But how do you—”
“We don’t know how fast it spreads, we gotta try, we owe the man at least that.”
“But—”
“I’m gonna need ya to go get the hacksaw from the shed and also bring—”
A voice rings out behind them, interrupting Philip’s tense litany: “Guys?”
It’s Brian, and from the grim sound of his nasally call, the news is most likely bad.
Philip and Nick turn.
Bobby Marsh is stone-still.
Brian’s eyes well up as he kneels next to the fat man. “It’s too late.”
Philip and Nick come over to where Bobby lies in the grass, his eyes closed. His big, flabby chest does not move. His mouth is slack.
“Oh no … Sweet Jesus Christ no,” Nick says, staring at his dead pal.
Philip doesn’t say anything for quite a long time. No one does.
The immense corpse lies still, there on the wet ground, for endless minutes … until something stirs in the man’s extremities, in the tendons of his massive legs, and in the tips of his plump fingers.
At first, the phenomenon looks like the typical residual nerve twitches that morticians might see now and again, the dieseling engine of a cadaver’s central nervous system. But as Nick and Brian gape, their eyes widening—both of them slowly rising, then slowly beginning to back away—Philip comes closer still, kneeling down, a sullen businesslike expression on his face.
Bobby Marsh’s eyes open.
The pupils have turned as white as pus.
Philip grabs the nail gun and presses it to the big man’s forehead just above the left eyebrow.
FFFFFFFFUMP!
* * *
Hours later. Inside the house. After dark. Penny asleep. Nick in the kitchen, drowning his grief in whiskey … Brian nowhere to be found … Bobby’s cooling corpse in
the backyard, covered in a tarp next to the other bodies … and Philip now standing at the living room window, gazing out through the slatted shutters at the growing number of dark figures on the street. They shuffle like sleepwalkers, moving back and forth behind the barricade. There are more of them now. Thirty, maybe. Forty even.
Streetlights shine through the cracks in the fence, the moving shadows breaking the beams at irregular intervals, making the light strobe, making Philip crazy. He hears the silent voice in his head—the same voice that first made itself known after Sarah had died: Burn the place down, burn the whole fucking world down.
For a moment earlier that day, after Bobby had died, the voice had wanted to mutilate the twelve-year-old’s body. The voice had wanted to take that dead thing apart. But Philip tamped it down, and now he’s fighting it again: The fuse is lit, brother, the clock is ticking …
Philip looks away from the window, and he rubs his tired eyes.
“It’s okay to let it out,” a different voice says now, coming from across the darkness.
Philip whirls and sees the silhouette of his brother across the living room, standing in the archway of the kitchen.
Turning back to the window, Philip offers no response. Brian comes over. He’s holding a bottle of cough syrup in his trembling hands. In the darkness his feverish eyes shimmer with tears. He stands there for a moment.
Then he says in low, soft voice, careful not to awaken Penny on the couch next to them, “There’s no shame in letting it out.”
“Letting what out?”
“Look,” Brian says, “I know you’re hurting.” He sniffs, wipes his mouth on his sleeve, his voice hoarse and congested. “All I wanted to say is, I’m really sorry about Bobby, I know you guys were—”
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