* * *
Gradually, the hordes of undead drift away from the immediate area, leaving behind only a few stragglers, giving the Blakes and Nick a chance to test the limits of their reconnaissance missions to neighboring buildings. Philip notices that Brian is getting bolder, willing to venture out of the building now and again on quick trips. But it’s Nick Parsons who truly seems to be taking to this place.
Nick sets up a room for himself in a studio apartment on the second floor—number 2F—at the east end of the corridor. He finds books and magazines in other apartments, and drags spare furniture into the studio. He spends time hanging out on the balcony, sketching pictures of the neighboring streets, mapping out the immediate area, reading his Bible, starting a garden for winter vegetables, and thinking a lot about what has happened to the human race.
He also completes his ramshackle catwalk between the two adjacent buildings.
The narrow walkway is hewn out of plywood and paint ladders lashed together with rope and duct tape (and more than a little praying). The footbridge extends off the back of the roof, spanning a twenty-five-foot gap over an alley, and connecting up with the top rail of a fire escape on the adjacent roof.
The completion of the catwalk marks a turning point for Nick. Getting up his courage one day, he shimmies across the rickety structure and—just as he had predicted—he makes it all the way to the southeast corner of the block without walking outside. From there, he figures out how to get into the pedestrian bridge to the department store. When he comes back that night with armfuls of goodies from Dillard’s, he is greeted like a returning war hero.
He brings them fancy gourmet candy and nuts; warm clothing; new shoes and embossed stationery; expensive pens; a collapsible camp stove; satin sheets and luxurious three-hundred-thread-count linens; and even stuffed animals for Penny. Even Tara lightens up at the sight of the European cigarettes with the pastel wrappers. And Nick is doing something else on these solo runs, something that he keeps to himself at first.
* * *
On the one-week anniversary of David Chalmers’s death, Nick talks Philip into tagging along on a little reconnaissance mission so Nick can reveal what he’s been doing. Philip is not crazy about crossing the ladder-bridge—he claims he’s worried about it breaking under his weight, but the thing that truly bothers Philip is his secret fear of heights. Nick persuades him by piquing his curiosity. “You gotta see this, Philly,” Nick enthuses on the roof. “This whole area is a goldmine, man. I’m tellin’ you it’s perfect.”
With great reluctance, Philip goes ahead and drags himself across the catwalk, on his hands and knees behind Nick, grumbling all the way (and secretly petrified). Philip doesn’t dare look down.
They reach the other side, hop down, descend a fire escape ladder, and then slip into the adjacent building through an open window.
Nick leads Philip through the deserted hallways of an accounting firm, the floors littered with forgotten forms and documents like so many fallen leaves. “Not much farther now,” Nick says, ushering Philip down a staircase and across a desolate lobby strewn with overturned furniture.
Philip is hyperaware of their echoing footsteps, crunching over cinders of debris. He feels the blind spots and empty spaces in his solar plexus, he hears every snap and every tick as though something might lumber out at them at any moment. He keeps his hand on the stock of the .22 thrust into his jeans. “Over here, right off the parking garage,” Nick says, pointing to an alcove at the end of the lobby.
Around a corner. Past an overturned vending machine. Up a short flight of steps. Through an unmarked metal door, and suddenly, almost without warning, the entire world opens up for Philip.
“Holy mother-of-pearl,” Philip marvels as he follows Nick across the pedestrian bridge. The enclosed walkway is filthy, scattered with trash and reeking of urine, the thick, reinforced Plexiglas walls so filmed with grime they distort the surrounding cityscape. But the view is spectacular. The passageway is flooded with light, and it feels like you can see for miles.
Nick pauses. “Pretty cool, huh?”
“Pretty fucking outstanding.” Thirty feet above the street, the wind buffeting the structure, Philip can look down and see scattered zombies wandering underneath them like exotic fish drifting below a glass-bottom boat. “If it wasn’t for those ugly motherfuckers, I’d show this to Penny.”
“That’s what I wanted to show you.” Nick walks over to the south side of the walkway. “You see that bus? About half a block down there?”
Philip sees it—a hulking silver MARTA bus sitting at the curb.
Nick says, “Look above the bus’s front door, by the mirror, on the right side, you see the mark?”
Sure enough, Philip sees a hand-drawn symbol above the passenger entrance—a hastily scrawled five-point star—done in red spray paint. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s a safe zone.”
“A what?”
“Been working my way down that street and up this one back here,” Nick tells him with the innocent pride of a kid showing a soapbox derby model to his dad. “There’s a barber shop over there, clean as a whistle, secure as a bank, the door unlocked.” He points farther up the street. “There’s an empty semitrailer up there a ways, in good shape, just sitting there, with a good, strong—whattya call ’em—accordion door? On the back end.”
“What’s the point here, Nicky?”
“Safe zones. Places you can duck into. If you’re on a supply run and you get in trouble or whatever. I’m finding them farther and farther down the street. Putting marks on ’em so we don’t miss ’em. There’s all sorts of cubbyholes out there, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Philip looks at him. “You’ve been going all the way down to the end of that street by yourself?”
“Yeah, you know—”
“Goddamnit, Nick. You shouldn’t be goin’ all the way out there without any backup.”
“Philly—”
“No, no … don’t just ‘Philly’ me on this, man. I’m serious. I want you to be more careful. You understand? I’m serious about this.”
“Okay, okay. You’re right.” Nick gives Philip a good-natured punch in the arm. “I hear you.”
“Good.”
“You gotta admit, though, this place rocks. Considering the situation we’re in?”
Philip shrugs, looking down through the grimy glass at the cannibal fish circling. “Yeah, I guess.”
“It could be a lot worse, Philly. We’re not in the tall buildings, it’s flat enough around here for you to see your way around. We got plenty of room to spread out at the apartment building, we got stores with supplies within walking distance. I’m even thinking we could find a generator somewhere, maybe hot-wire a car to get it back. I could see us staying here, Philly … I don’t know … for a long time.” He thinks about it some more. “Indefinitely … you know?”
Philip gazes through the filthy glass at the necropolis of empty buildings, and the ragged monsters meandering in and out of view. “Everything’s indefinite nowadays, Nicky.”
* * *
That night, Brian’s cough returns. The weather is getting colder and damper by the day, and it is taking a toll on Brian’s immune system. After dark, the apartment is freezing. By morning, it’s an icebox, the floor like a skating rink on the soles of Brian’s stocking feet. He’s taken to wearing three layers of sweaters and a knit scarf that Nick procured from Dillard’s. With his fingerless gloves and his thatch of unruly black hair and his hollow Edgar Allan Poe eyes, Brian is starting to look like a waif from a Charles Dickens novel.
“I think this place is really good for Penny,” Brian says to Philip that night on a second-floor balcony. The Blake brothers are having an after-dinner drink—more of the cheap wine—and gazing out at the desolate skyline. The cool evening air rustles their hair, and the zombie stink wafts just under the smell of rain.
Brian stares out at the distant silhouettes of dark buildings as if in a t
rance. For a person in twenty-first-century America, it is almost incomprehensible to see a great metropolis completely dark. But that’s exactly what the Blakes are looking at: a skyline so dead and black it looks like a mountain range on a moonless night. Every few moments, Brian thinks he sees the faint glint of a fire or a light twinkling in the black void. But it could very easily be his imagination.
“I think that gal April is the thing that’s doin’ the most good for Penny,” Philip says.
“Yeah, she’s really good with her.” Brian is also growing fond of April, and he’s been noticing that Philip may very well have a bit of a crush on her as well. Nothing would make Brian happier than to have Philip find a little peace right now, a little stability with a girlfriend.
“That other one’s a slice, though, ain’t she?” Philip says.
“Tara? Yeah. Not a happy camper.”
For the past few days, Brian has been generally avoiding Tara Chalmers—she is a walking ulcer, always irritable, paranoid, still in the throes of grief over her dad. But Brian figures she’ll eventually work her way through it. She seems like a decent person.
“The girl does not realize I saved her fucking life,” Philip says.
Brian lets out a series of dry coughs. Then he says, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
Philip looks at him. “What.”
“The old man turning like that?” Brian measures his words. He knows he’s not the only one worrying about this. Ever since David Chalmers came back from the dead and tried to devour his oldest daughter, Brian has been ruminating about the phenomenon, and the implications of what happened, and the rules of this savage new world, and maybe even the prognosis for the entire human race. “Think about it, Philip. He didn’t get bit. Right?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“So, why did he turn?”
For a moment, Philip just stares at Brian, and the darkness seems to expand around them. The city seems to stretch into infinity like the landscape of a dream. Brian feels gooseflesh on his arms as though the very act of putting it into words—saying it out loud—has unleashed a malevolent genie from a bottle. And they will never, ever be able to put that genie back.
Philip sips his wine. In the darkness, his face is grim and set. “Hell of lot we don’t know. Maybe he got infected with something earlier, maybe came into contact with just enough of it to start working on his system. The old man was on his way out anyway.”
“If that’s true, then we all—”
“Hey, professor. Give it a rest. We’re all healthy and we’re gonna stay that way.”
“I know. I’m just saying … maybe we ought to think about taking more precautions.”
“What precautions? I got your precautions right here.” He touches the stock of his .22-caliber Ruger stuffed behind his belt.
“I’m talking about washing up better, sterilizing stuff.”
“With what?”
Brian lets out a sigh and looks up at the overcast night sky, a low canopy of haze as dark as black wool. Autumn rains are brewing. “We got the water upstairs in the toilets,” he says. “We got the filters and the propane, and we got access to cleaning products down the street, soaps and cleansers and shit.”
“We’re already filtering the water, sport.”
“Yeah, but—”
“And we’re washing up with that contraption Nicky found.” The so-called contraption is an outdoor camp shower that Nick found in Dillard’s sporting goods department. About the size of a small cooler, it has a collapsible five-gallon tank and a shower hose that operates off a battery-powered pump. For five days now, they’ve each been enjoying the periodic luxury of a brief shower, recycling the water as much as possible.
“I know, I know … I’m just saying, maybe it’s like, better to go overboard right now with the cleanliness. That’s all. Until we know more.”
Philip gives him a hard look. “And what if there ain’t nothing more to learn?”
Brian has no answer for that one.
The only response comes from the city, humming darkly back at them, with a blast of foul-smelling wind and a big, silent fuck you.
* * *
Maybe it’s the alarming conglomeration of unappetizing ingredients concocted that night by April and Penny for dinner—a mixture of canned asparagus, Spam, and crumbled potato chips cooked over a propane flame—sitting like a dropped anchor in the pit of Philip’s stomach. Or perhaps it’s the cumulative effect of all the stress and rage and sleeplessness that does it. Or maybe it’s the conversation he had on the balcony with his brother. But regardless of the cause, after he turns in for the night, and drifts off into an uneasy sleep, Philip Blake experiences an elaborate and lurid dream.
He has the dream in his newly established private quarters (April’s former bedroom was apparently once somebody’s home office—while clearing out the owner’s things, Philip and April found stacks of Mary Kay Cosmetics order forms and makeup samples). But now, lying on the queen-sized bed shoved against the wall, Philip writhes in semiconsciousness, drifting in and out of a feverish horror show. It’s the kind of dream that has no shape. It has no beginning, middle, or end. It just keeps spinning in its rut of circular terror.
He finds himself back in his childhood home in Waynesboro—the shabby little bungalow on Farrel Street—in the back bedroom he used to share with Brian. Philip is not a child in the dream, he is an adult, and somehow the plague has time-traveled back to the 1970s. The dream is almost three-dimensionally vivid. There’s the lily of the valley wallpaper, and the Iron Maiden posters, and the scarred school desk, and Brian is somewhere in the house, unseen, screaming, and Penny is also there, in some adjacent room, crying for her daddy. Philip runs through the hallways, which form an endless labyrinth. Plaster is cracking. The zombie horde is outside, clamoring to get in. The boarded windows are trembling. Philip has a hammer and tries to secure the windows with nails, but the head of the hammer falls off. Crashing noises. Philip sees a door cracking open and he rushes over to it, and the doorknob comes off in his hand. He searches drawers and cabinets for weapons, and the facings fall off the cabinets, and plaster sifts down from the ceiling, and his boot breaks through a hole in the floor. The walls are collapsing, and the linoleum is buckling, and the windows are falling from their frames, and Philip keeps hearing Penny’s desperate, shrieking voice calling for him: “DADDY!”
Skeletal arms thrust through crumbling window casements, blackened, curled fingers groping.
“DADDY?”
Bone-white skulls burst up through the floor like gruesome periscopes.
“DADDY!”
Philip lets out a silent scream as the dream shatters apart like spun glass.
FOURTEEN
Philip gasps awake with a start. He jerks forward on the bed, blinking and squinting at the pale morning light. Someone stands at the foot of his bed. No. Two people. He sees them now—one tall and one short.
“Good morning, sunshine,” April says with her hand around Penny’s shoulder.
“Jesus.” Philip sits up against the headboard in his wifebeater and sweatpants. “What the hell time is it?”
“It’s like almost noon.”
“Holy Christ,” Philip utters, getting his bearings. His entire sinewy form is filmed with cold sweat. His neck aches and his mouth tastes like a litter box. “I can’t believe it.”
“We gotta show you something, Daddy,” the little girl tells him, her big eyes ablaze with excitement. The sight of his daughter looking so happy sends a soothing wave of relief through Philip, driving the last remnants of the dream from his feverish brain.
He gets up and gets dressed, telling the two ladies to calm down. “Gimme a second to put my face on,” he says in a hoarse, whiskey-cured grunt, running fingers through his greasy hair.
* * *
They take him up to the roof. When they emerge from the fire door and plunge into the cool air and light, Philip balks at the glare. Despite the fac
t that the day is overcast and dark, Philip is hungover and the light makes his eyeballs throb. He squints up at the sky and sees the foreboding storm clouds churning and roiling into the area from the north. “Looks like rain,” he says.
“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?”
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