The old man finally lets out a flinty laugh. He lays his gun on his lap, crosswise, letting up on the hammers, all the tension draining out of his gaunt face. The oxygen tank pings. “My friend, you’re lookin’ at what’s left of the World Famous Chalmers Family Band, stars of stage, screen, and state fairs across the South.” The old man sets the gun down on the floor with a grunt. He looks up at Philip. “I apologize for the ornery reception.” He struggles to his feet, rising to his full height until he looks like a withered Abe Lincoln. “Name’s David Chalmers, mandolin, vocals, and father of these two ragamuffins.”
Philip shoves his gun back behind his belt. “Philip Blake. This is my brother Brian. And that wallflower over there is Nick Parsons … and I thank you kindly for saving our asses out there.”
The two patriarchs shake hands, and the tension goes out of the room with the suddenness of an off switch being thrown.
* * *
It turns out there was a fourth member of the Chalmers Family Band—Mrs. Chalmers—a portly little matron from Chattanooga who sang high soprano on the group’s bluegrass and old-timey numbers. According to April, it was a blessing in disguise that the matriarch of the family succumbed to pneumonia five years earlier. If she had lived to see this horrible shit inflicting the human race, she would have been crushed, would have seen it as the end-time, and probably would have walked right off the pier at Clark’s Hill Lake.
So it was that the Chalmers Family Band became a trio, and went on with the act, playing the carny circuit across the tristate area, with Tara on bass, April on guitar, and Daddy on mandolin. As a single father, the sixty-six-year-old David had his hands full. Tara was a pothead, and April had her mother’s temper and single-mindedness.
When the plague broke out, they were in Tennessee at a bluegrass festival, and they made their way back home in the band’s camper. They got as far as the Georgia border before the camper broke down. From there, they got lucky enough to find an Amtrak train that was still running between Dalton and Atlanta. Unfortunately, the train deposited them smack-dab in the middle of the southeast side, at King Memorial Station, which was now lousy with the dead. Somehow, they managed to work their way north without getting attacked, traveling at night in stolen cars, searching for the mythical refugee center.
“And that’s how we ended up here in our little low-rent paradise,” April tells Philip in a soft voice late that night. She sits on the end of a tattered sofa, while Penny dozes restlessly next to her in a wad of blankets. Philip sits nearby.
Candles are lit on the coffee table. Nick and Brian are asleep on the floor across the room, while David and Tara are each snoring in a different musical key in their respective rooms.
“We’re too petrified to go upstairs, though,” April adds with a trace of regret in her voice. “Even though we could use whatever supplies are still up there. Batteries, canned goods, whatever. Jesus, I’d give my left tit for some toilet paper.”
“Never give that up for a little toilet paper,” Philip says with a grin, sitting barefoot in his stained T-shirt and jeans at the other end of the sofa, his belly full of rice and beans. The Chalmerses’ supplies are running low, but they still had half of the ten-pound bag of rice that they pilfered from a broken shop window a week ago, and enough beans to make dinner for everyone. April cooked. The grub wasn’t bad, either. After dinner, Tara rolled cigarettes with the last of her Red Man tobacco and a few buds of skunkweed. Philip partook in a few puffs, even though he had sworn off pot years ago—it usually made him hear things in his head that he didn’t want to hear. Now his brain feels woolly and thick in the strange afterglow.
April manages a sad smile. “Yeah, well … so close and yet so far.”
“What do you mean?” Philip looks at her, and then slowly looks up at the ceiling. “Oh … right.” He remembers hearing the noise earlier, and making note of it. They’ve quieted down now, but the shuffling, creaking noises from the higher floors have intermittently been crossing the ceiling all evening, moving with the insidious, invisible presence of termites. The fact that Philip almost forgot about these noises is a testament to how desensitized he’s becoming to the prospects of such proximity to the dead. “What about the other ground-floor apartments?” he asks her.
“We picked them clean, got every last bit of usable stuff out of them.”
“What happened in Druid Hills?” he asks after a moment of silence.
April lets out a sigh. “Folks told us there was a refugee center up there. There wasn’t.”
Philip looks at her. “And?”
April shrugs. “We got there and found a whole bunch of people hiding out behind the gates of this big scrap-metal place. People just like us. Scared, confused. We tried to talk some of them into leaving with us. Strength in numbers, all that gung-ho shit.”
“So, what happened?”
“I guess they were too scared to leave and too scared to stay.” April looks down, her face reflecting the candlelight. “Tara and Dad and I found a car that would run, and we gathered up some supplies and took off. But we heard the motorcycles coming when we were pulling away.”
“Motorcycles?”
She nods, rubs her eyes. “We got about a quarter of a mile down the road—maybe not even that far—and we round this hill and all of a sudden we hear, way in the distance behind us, these screams. And we look back across the valley, where this dusty old salvage yard is, and it’s like … I don’t know. Fucking Road Warrior or something.”
“It’s what?”
“This motorcycle gang is tearing the place apart, running people down, entire families, God knows what else. It was pretty damn ugly. And the weird thing is, it wasn’t the near-miss that got to us. It wasn’t the bullet we dodged. I think it was the guilt. We all wanted to go back and help, and be good upstanding citizens and all that, but we didn’t.” She looks at him. “Because we ain’t good upstanding citizens; there ain’t any of those left.”
Philip looks at Penny. “I can see why your daddy wasn’t crazy about the idea of taking in boarders.”
“Ever since that scrap-yard fiasco, he’s been real paranoid about running across any survivors—maybe more paranoid than he is about the Biters.”
“Biters … I heard you say that before. Who came up with that one?”
“That’s my dad’s term; it kinda stuck.”
“I like it.” Philip smiles at her again. “And I like your daddy. He takes care of business, and I don’t blame him for not trusting us. He seems like a tough old nut, and I respect that. We need more like him.”
She sighs. “He’s not as tough as he used to be, I’ll tell you that.”
“What’s he got? Lung cancer?”
“Emphysema.”
“That’s not good,” Philip says, and then he sees something that stops him cold.
April Chalmers has her hand on Penny’s shoulder and is almost absently stroking the little girl as she sleeps. It’s such a tender, unexpected gesture—so natural—that it reaches down into Philip and awakens something inside him that’s long been dormant. He can’t understand the feeling at first, and his confusion must be showing on his face because April looks up at him.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, I’m … I’m good.” He touches the Band-Aid on his temple where he smacked himself in the collision earlier that day. The Chalmerses dug out their first-aid kit and patched everybody up before dinner. “Tell you what,” Philip says. “You go get some sleep, and in the morning, the boys and I will clear out the upstairs.”
She looks at him for a moment like she’s wondering whether or not to trust him.
* * *
The next morning, after breakfast, Philip shows April that his word is good. He enlists Nick, and he grabs extra magazines for the Ruger and a box of shells for one of the Marlins. He shoves the bad-axes down either side of his belt, and gives a small pickaxe to Nick for close encounters.
Pausing by the door, Philip crouches down to tighten
the laces of his logger boots, which are so spattered with mud and gore that they look like they’re embroidered with black and purple thread.
“Y’all be careful up there,” old David Chalmers says, standing in the doorway of the kitchenette. He looks gray and washed out in the morning light, leaning on the metal caddy in which his oxygen tank is mounted. The tube under his nose softly whistles with each breath. “Y’all don’t know what you’re gonna find.”
“Always,” Philip says, tucking his denim shirt inside his jeans, checking the axes for quick and easy access. Nick stands over him, waiting with the goose gun on his shoulder. There’s a taut expression on Nick’s face, a combination of grim determination and excitement.
“Most of ’em will be on the second floor,” the old man adds.
“We’ll clear ’em on out.”
“Just watch yer backs.”
“Will do,” Philip says, rising to his feet and checking the axes.
“I’m coming.”
Philip whirls around to see Brian standing there with a clean T-shirt on—an REM logo on the front, the pride of Athens—and a dour, purposeful expression on his face. He’s cradling one of the shotguns in his arms like it’s a living thing.
“You sure?”
“Hell yeah.”
“What about Penny?”
“The gals will watch her.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on,” Brian says. “You need an extra pair of eyes up there. I’m up for it.”
Philip thinks it over. He glances across the living room and sees his daughter sitting Indian-style on the floor between the two Chalmers women. The ladies are playing crazy eights with a tattered deck of cards, making Penny periodically smile and slap down a card. It’s been a long time since the little girl has smiled. Philip turns to his brother and offers a grin. “That’s the spirit.”
* * *
They get up there via the stairs at the end of the first-floor corridor—the elevators at the other end as dead as the zombies—but first they have to tear the wooden bracings off the door. The noise of axe blows and nails squeaking out seems to stimulate movement above them, in the dark chambers behind apartment doors. At one point, Philip passes gas with all the exertion, a reminder of April’s bean dinner from the night before.
“That fart’s gonna wipe out more zombies than any twenty-gauge shell,” Nick comments.
“Hardy-har-har,” Philip says and tears off the last of the bracing planks
On their way up the dark stairwell, Philip says, “Remember, y’all—be quick. They are slippery motherfuckers but they’re slow as shit, and dumber than Nick here.”
“Hardy-har, back atcha,” Nick says, expertly injecting a pair of .20-gauge shells into his goose gun.
They reach the top landing, and find the fire door to the second floor shut tightly. They pause. Brian is shaking.
“Calm down, sport,” Philip tells his brother, noticing the barrel of the shotgun is wavering, trembling slightly. Philip gently pushes the muzzle away from the general vicinity of his ribs. “And try not to accidentally send a ball of that bird shot into one of us.”
“I got it under control,” Brian retorts in a shaky, tense voice, revealing that he obviously has nothing under control.
“Here we go,” Philip says. “And remember, go at them hard and quick.”
A single, fierce kick with the shank of his boot heel sends the door lurching open.
ELEVEN
For a millisecond, they stand there with hearts beating like trip-hammers. Other than a few scattered candy wrappers and empty, broken pop bottles, and one hell of a lot of dust, the second-floor hall—identical to the ground-floor corridor—is empty. Dim daylight shines through the far windows and laces through streaks of dust motes, which cant down across the closed doors: 2A, 2C, and 2E along one side, 2B, 2D, and 2F along the other.
Nick whispers, “They’re all locked inside their places.”
Philip nods. “Gonna be like shooting fish in a damn barrel.”
“Come on, let’s do it,” Brian says unconvincingly. “Let’s get it done.”
Philip glances at his brother, then glances at Nick. “John Rambo here.”
They go over to the first door on the right—2F—and raise the business ends of their guns. Philip snaps the slide on the Ruger.
Then he kicks the door in.
A giant ball of stink punches them in their faces. It is the first thing that registers: a hideous stew of human degradation, urine and feces—and zombie stench—vying for dominance over the sharper odors of rancid food and moldy bathrooms and mildewed clothes. It is so overwhelming and unbearable that it literally drives the men back a half step each.
“Jesus wept,” Nick says in a choked utterance, involuntarily averting his face, as if the stench is a wind blowing at him.
“Still think my fart stinks?” Philip says as he takes a careful step into the reeking shadows of the apartment. He raises the .22.
Nick and Brian follow with shotguns at the ready, eyes wide and shiny with tension.
A moment later, they find four of them in repose, on the floor of a ransacked living room, each one slumped in a corner, slack jawed and catatonic, growling languidly at the sight of intruders, but too stupid or sick or demented to move, as though they have grown weary of their hellish fate and now have forgotten how to use furniture. It’s hard to tell in the gloomy light, especially with their faces all bloated and blackened with mortified flesh, but it looks as though it’s another family: mom and dad and two grown kids. The walls have weird patches of scratch marks, like a giant abstract painting, showing evidence that the things were following some flickering instinct to claw their way out.
Philip goes over to the first one, its shark eyes glimmering as the Ruger looms. The blast sends its brains across the Jackson Pollock of scratch marks behind it. The thing sinks to the floor. Meanwhile, Nick is across the room putting another one out of its misery, the boom of the Marlin like a great dry paper sack popping. Brain matter paints the walls. Philip takes the third one down as it is slowly rising, Nick moving toward the fourth—BOOM!—and the sounds of fluids spattering surfaces are buffered by the ringing in their ears.
Brian is standing ten paces behind them, his gun poised, his spirit drowning inside him on a rising tide of repulsion and nausea. “This is—this is not—” he starts to say, but a flash of movement to his left cuts off his words.
* * *
The errant zombie comes at Brian from the depths of a side hallway, plunging out of the shadows like a monstrous clown with a black fright wig and candy eyes. Before Brian even has a chance to identify it as a daughter or girlfriend, dressed in a torn robe with one shriveled breast exposed like a flap of chewed meat, the thing pounces on him with the force of a defensive back making a tackle.
Brian sprawls backward to the floor, and it all happens so fast that Philip and Nick have no time to intercede. They are too far away.
The moving cadaver lands on top of Brian, the thing snarling with black, slimy teeth and—in that split instant before Brian realizes that he is still holding the shotgun—the zombie opens its jaws so wide it looks as though its skull is about to unhinge.
Brian gets one horrible glimpse down the recesses of the thing’s throat—an endless black well straight down into hell—before he instinctively jerks the shotgun up. Almost by accident, the muzzle lodges itself in the gaping hole of the thing’s mouth, and Brian screams out a garbled cry as he squeezes off a single blast.
The back of the thing’s skull explodes, sending up a cloud of blood mist and tissue. The backwash hits the ceiling in deep purple arterial matter, and Brian is thunderstruck for a moment, his back pinned to the floor. The thing’s head is still skewered on the shaft of the shotgun. He blinks. The silver eyes of the girlfriend or daughter, or whoever she was, are frozen now and fixed on Brian.
He coughs and turns away as the girl’s head slowly slides down the length of the barrel, a giant
shish kebob, the dead eyes still locked on Brian. He feels the moist slime of her face on his hands. He closes his eyes. He can’t move. His right hand still glued to the trigger, his left still welded to the stock, he grimaces with horror.
Cold laughter brings him back around. “Look who just scored his first touchdown,” Philip Blake says, standing over his brother in a cloud of cordite smoke, grinning from ear to ear with mirthless delight.
* * *
Nick is the one who finds the egress to the roof, and Philip is the one who gets the idea to deposit all the rotting carcasses up there so they don’t stink up the place any further (or make the scavenger hunt through the upper floors any more unpleasant than it has to be).
It takes them a little over an hour to drag all the inhuman remains up the stairwell to the third floor, and then up through a narrow stairwell to the fire door. They have to shoot the lock off, and have to work in a sort of modified bucket brigade, dragging the smelly flesh sacks down the hallways and up two flights of stairs to the roof, leaving leech trails of gore on the cabbage-rose carpet runners.
They manage to get every last one of them—they terminated fourteen of them altogether, going through two entire clips of .22-caliber rounds, as well as half a box of shells—up the passageway and onto the roof.
“Look at this place,” Nick marvels as he puts the last carcass down on the tarpaper warning track along the east side of the roof, the wind whipping his pant legs and tossing his hair. The corpses lie in a row like cordwood lined up for the winter. Brian stands at the opposite end of the file, gazing down at the dead things with a strange, implacable expression on his face.
“Pretty cool,” Philip says, walking over to the edge of the roof.
At this height, he can see the distant buildings of the exclusive Buckhead area, Peachtree Plaza, and the glass cathedral of skyscrapers to the west. The frozen spires of the city rise in pristine summits, impassive, stoic in the sunlight, untouched by the apocalypse. Down below, Philip sees the scattered wandering dead moving in and out of shadows like broken toy soldiers come to life.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 14
