“Coming!” she blurts in a strangled voice as she pulls on her clothes.
She goes to the door. “Oh … hey,” she mumbles after opening the door and seeing Martinez standing on her porch in the pale light.
The tall, rangy Latino wears a bandanna pirate-style around his head, and he has muscular arms, which poke through the cutoff sleeves of his work shirt. He has an assault rifle slung over his broad shoulder, and his handsome face furrows with concern. “What the hell’s going on in there?” he says, giving her the once-over, his dark eyes shining with worry.
“I’m fine,” she says, a tad unconvincingly.
“Did you forget?”
“Um … no.”
“Get your guns, Lilly,” he says. “We’re going on that run I told you about, and we need all hands on deck.”
THREE
“Morning, boss!”
A squat, middle-aged, bald man named Gus greets Martinez and Lilly out by the farthest semitruck, which blocks the exit gate on the north side of town. With his rhino-thick neck and oil-stained sleeveless T-shirt stretched taut by a rotund belly, Gus gives off the impression of a blunt instrument. But what he lacks in intelligence, he makes up for in loyalty.
“Morning, Gus,” Martinez says as he walks up. “You mind grabbing a couple of them empty gas containers, in case we hit pay dirt on the trip?”
“Right away, boss.”
Gus whirls and trundles off with his pistol-grip 12-gauge under his arm like a newspaper he hasn’t gotten around to reading. Martinez and Lilly watch the little troll vanish around a corner.
Lilly glances to the east and sees the early morning sun peering over the crest of the barricade. It’s not even seven yet and already the unseasonable chill of the previous week has burned off. In this part of Georgia, spring can be a tad bipolar—coming in cool and wet, but turning as warm and humid as the tropics without warning.
“Lilly, why don’t you ride in back with the others.” Martinez nods toward a big military cargo truck in the middle distance. “I’ll put ol’ Gus up in the shotgun seat with me, in case we have to pick off anything on the way.”
Idling under a canopy of swaying live oaks, the heavy-duty truck sits perpendicular to the semitruck. It features enormous mud-speckled tires and a mine-resistant, riveted hull as durable as a tank—a recent acquisition from the neighboring National Guard station. The rear hatch is draped in a tarp.
As Martinez and Lilly approach, an older man in a baseball cap and silk roadie jacket comes around the front of the truck, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. A weather-beaten, rail-thin sixty-something with cunning eyes and an iron-gray goatee, David Stern has the vaguely regal, hard-ass bearing of a college football coach. “She was down a quart,” he says to Martinez. “I put some recycled oil in her … ought to keep her going a while. Morning, Lilly.”
Lilly gives the man a groggy nod and mumbles a drowsy greeting.
Gus returns with a pair of battered plastic gas containers.
“Throw them in back, Gus.” Martinez circles around the rear of the truck. Lilly and David follow. “Where’s the little lady, David?”
“In here!” The tarp flaps open, and Barbara Stern sticks her graying head out. Also in her mid-sixties, she wears a denim jacket over a faded cotton muumuu, and has the wild, silver tendrils of an aging earth mother. Her deeply lined, sun-browned face is animated with the rapier wit that has presumably kept her husband on his toes all these years. “Trying to teach Junior here something. It’s like pulling teeth.”
The “Junior” to which she refers suddenly peeks out of the cargo hold next to her.
“Nag, nag, nag,” the young man says with a rascally smirk. A boyish twenty-two, with long, dark, espresso-brown curls, Austin Ballard has deep-set eyes that sparkle with mischief. In his leather bomber jacket and multiple strands of bling around his neck, he affects the air of a second-tier rock star, an incorrigible bad boy. “How the hell do you stand it, Dave?” he says.
“Drink heavily and agree with everything she says,” David Stern cracks wise from behind Martinez. “Barbara, stop mothering the boy.”
“He was trying to light up in here, for Chrissake,” Barbara Stern grumbles. “You want I should let him smoke and send us all to kingdom come?”
“Okay, everybody, can it.” Martinez checks his ammo magazine. He’s all business, maybe even a little jittery. “We got a job to do. Y’all know the drill. Let’s get this done with a minimum of bullshit.”
Martinez orders Lilly and David to get in back with the other two, and then leads Gus around to the cab.
Lilly climbs up and into the rank atmosphere of the cargo hold. The airless chamber smells of old sweat, cordite, and must. A caged dome light shines down dully on shipping containers lined along either side of the corrugated floor. Lilly looks for a place to plant herself.
“I saved a seat for ya,” Austin says to her with a lascivious little grin, patting the unoccupied trunk next to him. “C’mon, take a load off … I won’t bite.”
Lilly rolls her eyes, lets out a sigh, and sits down next to the young man.
“You keep your hands to yourself, Romeo,” Barbara Stern jokes from the opposite side of the gloomy enclosure. She sits on a low wooden crate next to David, who grins at the twosome across the cargo hold.
“They do make a good pair, though, don’t they?” David says with a gleam in his eyes.
“Oh please,” Lilly murmurs with mild disgust. The last thing she wants to do is get involved with a twenty-two-year-old, especially a kid as annoyingly flirty as Austin Ballard. Over the past three months—since he drifted into Woodbury from the north, arriving malnourished and dehydrated with a ragtag group of ten—he’s hit on just about every single woman not yet in menopause.
If pressed, however, Lilly would have to concede that Austin Ballard is what her old friend Megan would call “easy on the eyes.” With his curly mane and long lashes, he could easily kindle Lilly’s lonely soul. Plus there seems to be more than meets the eye about the kid. Lilly has seen him in action. Underneath the pretty-boy looks and roguish charm lies a tough, plague-hardened young man who seems to be more than willing to put himself on the line for his fellow survivors.
“Lilly likes to play hard to get,” Austin prods, still with that sideways grin. “But she’ll come around.”
“Keep dreaming,” Lilly mutters as the truck vibrates and rumbles.
The gears kick in, and the cargo hold shudders as the vehicle slowly pulls forward.
Lilly hears a second engine—a big diesel—revving outside the hatch. Her stomach clenches slightly at the sound as she realizes that the exit is opening.
* * *
Martinez watches the semitrailer slowly backing away from the breach, its vertical stack spitting and spewing exhaust, opening up a twenty-five-foot gap in the barricade.
The woods adjacent to Woodbury reveal themselves in the pale sun a hundred yards away. No walkers in sight. Yet. The sun, still low in the sky, streams through the distant trees in hazy motes, burning off the predawn fog.
Pulling forward another twenty feet, Martinez brings the truck to a stop and rolls down his window. He peers up at two gunners perched on a cherry picker, which is pushed up against the corner of the wall. “Miller! Do me a favor, will ya?”
One of the men—a skinny African American in an Atlanta Falcons jersey—leans over the edge. “You name it, boss.”
“While we’re gone, keep the wall clear of biters. Can you do that for me?”
“Will do!”
“We want an easy entryway back in. You follow me?”
“We’re on it, man! No worries!”
Martinez lets out a sigh, rolling his window back up. “Yeah, right,” he mumbles under his breath, slamming the truck into gear and then stepping on the gas. The vehicle rumbles away into the dusky morning.
Just for an instant, Martinez glances through the driver’s side window at the side mirror. Through veils of dust stirred up b
y the massive tires, he sees Woodbury receding into the distance behind them. “No worries … sure. What could possibly go wrong?”
* * *
It takes them half an hour to get to Interstate 85. Martinez takes Woodbury Road west, weaving through the abandoned carcasses of cars and trucks littering the two-lane, keeping his speed between forty and fifty miles per hour in the unlikely event some errant biter tries to lumber out of the woods and latch on to them.
As the cargo truck intermittently swerves between wrecks, the rocking motion keeps the folks in back holding on to their seats. Feeling nauseous, Lilly studiously avoids brushing up against Austin.
En route to the interstate, they pass Greenville, another little farming community along Highway 18 that is practically the mirror image of Woodbury. Once upon a time, Greenville was the county seat, a quaint little enclave of redbrick government buildings, white capital domes, and stately Victorian homes, many of which were on the historic registry. Now the place lies demolished and drained of all life in the harsh morning sun. Through the flapping rear tarp, Lilly can see the rubble—boarded windows, broken colonnades, and overturned cars.
“Looks like Greenville’s been picked clean,” David Stern comments morosely as they stare out the back at the passing devastation. Many of the windows bear the telltale spray-paint mark—a big capital D in a circle, meaning DEAD, meaning “Don’t bother”—which adorns many of the buildings in this part of the state.
“What’s the plan, Dave?” Austin asks, cleaning his fingernails with a hunting knife, an affectation that annoys Lilly immensely. She can’t decide whether it’s a genuine habit or strictly for show.
David Stern shrugs. “I guess the next town over—Hogansville, I think it is—has a grocery store that Martinez thinks is still viable.”
“Viable?”
Another shrug from David. “Who knows … it’s all process of elimination.”
“Yeah, well … let’s just make sure we don’t get eliminated in the process.” He turns and pokes an elbow gently against Lilly’s ribs. “Get it, Lilly?”
“Hardy-har-har,” she says, and then glances back out the rear.
They pass a familiar access road snaking off the main two-lane, a tall roadside sign glaring in the morning sun. The trademark logo, with its gold sunburst, leans to one side, the big blue letters cracked and faded and strafed with bird shit:
Walmart
Save money. Live better.
A cold trickle of dread sluices down Lilly’s midsection as she remembers the events of the previous year. At this very Walmart, she and Josh and their contingent from Atlanta first stumbled upon Martinez and his goons. In flashes of woozy memories, Lilly remembers finding guns and supplies … and then running into Martinez … the standoff … Megan freaking out … and then Martinez doing his sales pitch … and finally Josh agonizing over whether or not they should try Woodbury on for size.
“What’s wrong with this joint?” Austin jerks his thumb toward the defunct retail outlet as they roar past the lot.
“Everything’s wrong with it,” Lilly murmurs under her breath.
She sees stray walkers wandering the Walmart’s parking lot like hellish revenants, the overturned cars and scattered shopping carts so weather-beaten and fossilized they now have weeds growing up through their guts. The gas station islands are blackened and scorched from the fires that ravaged the place back in February. And the store resembles an ancient ruin of broken glass and sagging metal, empty cartons and boxes vomited out of gaping windows.
“Place got picked clean of food and supplies long ago,” David Stern laments. “Everybody and their brother had a go at it.”
As they pass the Walmart, Lilly gets a glimpse through the fluttering tarp of the rural farmland north of the property. The shadows of walkers—from this distance as small and indistinct as bugs under a rock—inch back and forth beneath the foliage and behind the dead cornstalks.
Since the advent of the herd last year, walker activity has picked up, the population of living dead growing and spreading into the backwaters and desolate farmlands that once lay fallow and deserted. Rumors have circulated that ragtag groups of scientists in Washington and underground labs out West are developing behavioral models and population forecasts for the reanimated dead, and none of it is promising. Bad news hangs over the land, and it hangs right now in the dimly lit cargo hold of the transport truck, as Lilly tries to push dark thoughts from her mind.
“Hey, Barbara.” Lilly shoots a glance at the gray-haired woman sitting across from her. “Why don’t you tell us the famous story again?”
Austin gives a good-natured roll of the eyes. “Oh, God … not this again.”
Lilly gives him a look. “You be quiet. C’mon, Barbara, tell us the honeymoon story.”
Austin rubs his eyes. “Somebody shoot me.”
“Shush!” Lilly pokes Austin, then looks at the older woman and manages a smile. “Go ahead, Barbara.”
The gray-haired woman grins at her husband. “You want to tell it?”
David puts his arm around his wife. “Sure, this’ll be a first … me doing the talking.” He looks at the older woman with that glimmer in his eye, and something passes between the two of them that reaches out across the dim enclosure and squeezes Lilly’s heart. “Okay … first of all, it was back in the prehistoric days when I still had black hair and a prostate that worked.”
Barbara gives him an amused punch in the arm. “Can you just cut to the chase, please? These people can do without your entire urinary history.”
The truck rumbles over a railroad track, rattling the cargo hold. David holds on to his perch, then takes a deep breath and grins. “The thing is, we were just kids … but we were madly in love.”
“Still are, for some reason … God knows why,” Barbara adds with a smirk, giving him a loaded glance.
David sticks his tongue out at her. “So anyway … we found ourselves headed to the most beautiful place on earth—Iguazu, Argentina—with nothing but the clothes on our backs and about a hundred bucks in pesos.”
Again Barbara chimes in: “If memory serves, ‘Iguazu’ means ‘the Devil’s throat,’ and it’s basically a river that runs through Brazil and Argentina. We read about it in a guidebook, and we thought it would be the perfect adventure.”
David sighs. “So, anyway … we get there on a Sunday, and by Monday night we had hiked all the way upriver—maybe five miles—to this incredible waterfall.”
Barbara shakes her head. “Five miles?! Are you kidding me? It was more like twenty-five!”
David winks at Lilly. “She exaggerates. Trust me … it was only like twenty or thirty kilometers.”
Barbara playfully crosses her arms across her chest. “David? How many kilometers are in a mile?”
He sighs and shakes his head. “I don’t know, honey, but I’m sure you’re about to tell us.”
“Like one point six … so thirty kilometers would be about twenty miles.”
David gives her another look. “Can I tell the story? Is that all right with you?”
She looks away petulantly. “Who’s stopping you?”
“So we find this amazing waterfall, and I mean, this is the most beautiful waterfall on earth. From a single point, you’re practically surrounded, three hundred and sixty degrees, and the water’s roaring all around you.”
“And rainbows!” Barbara marvels. “Everywhere you look. It really was something.”
“So then,” David goes on. “Lover-girl here decides to get frisky.”
Barbara grins. “I just wanted to give him a little hug, that’s all.”
“And she’s feeling me up with the water rushing all around us—”
“I wasn’t feeling you up!”
“She was all over me. And all of a sudden, she goes, ‘David, where’s your wallet?’ And I feel the back of my jeans, and sure enough, the thing’s gone.”
Barbara shakes her head, reliving the moment for the millionth time. �
��My fanny pack was empty, too. Somebody had ripped us off somewhere along the line. Passports, ID, everything. We were stuck in the middle of Argentina and we were stupid Americans, and we had no effen clue what to do with ourselves.”
David smiles to himself, holding the moment in his memory like a precious heirloom he keeps in a drawer. Lilly gets the feeling that this is something essential for the Sterns, something unspoken but as powerful as the motion of the tides or the gravitational tug of the moon. “We get back to the closest village and make a few calls,” David continues, “but there’s no embassy for miles and the cops are about as helpful as a poke in the eye.”
“We’re told we have to wait for our ID issues to be sorted out in Buenos Aires.”
“Which is like eight hundred miles away.”
“Kilometers, Barbara. Eight hundred kilometers away.”
“David, don’t start.”
“Anyway, we have a few centavos left in our pockets—the equivalent of what, Barbara? A buck fifty? So we find a little village and talk a local guy into letting us sleep on the floor of his barn for fifty centavos.”
Barbara smiles wistfully. “It wasn’t exactly the Ritz but we made do.”
David grins at her. “Turned out the man ran a little restaurant in town, and he agreed to let us work there while we waited for our passports to be ironed out. Babs waited tables while I worked in back, slinging chorizo and making menudo for the locals.”
“Funny thing was, it turned out to be one of the best times of our lives.” Barbara lets out a pensive sigh. “We were in such a different environment, and all we had to rely on was each other, but that was … it was … nice.” She looks at her husband and for the first time, her wrinkled, matronly face softens. A look comes over her—just for an instant—that obliterates time, erases all the years, and turns her back into a young bride in love with a good man. “In fact,” she says softly, “it was even kinda sorta terrific.”
David looks at his wife. “We were stuck there for—what? How long was it, Babs?”
The Walking Dead Collection Page 64
