“We were there for two and a half months, waiting for word from the embassy, sleeping with the goats, living off that god-awful menudo.”
“It was … an experience.” David puts his arm around his woman. He softly kisses her temple. “Wouldn’t have traded it for all the tea in Tennessee.”
The truck shudders over another series of bumps, and the noisy silence that ensues weighs down on Lilly. She had expected the story to lift her spirits. She had expected it to distract her, soothe her, maybe even put a salve on her brooding thoughts. But it has only served to pick at the scab that she has grown over her heart. It has made her feel small, alone, and insignificant.
Dizziness courses over her and she feels like crying … for Josh … for Megan … for herself … for this whole upside-down nightmare gripping the land.
At last, Austin breaks the spell with a confused furrow of his brow. “What the fuck is menudo?”
* * *
The cargo truck bangs over a series of petrified railroad tracks and enters Hogansville from the west. Martinez keeps both hands on the wheel as he scans the deserted streets and storefronts through the windshield.
The mass exodus has left the small village overgrown with prairie grass and ironweed, boarded up tight, and littered with cast-off belongings across the roadway—moldy mattresses, loose drawers, and filthy clothing clogging every gutter. A few stray walkers as ragged as scarecrows wander aimlessly in the alleys and empty parking lots.
Martinez applies the brakes and slows the truck to a steady twenty miles an hour. He sees a street sign and consults a page torn out of an old phone book, which he has taped to the dashboard. The location of the Hogansville Piggly Wiggly seems to be on the west side of town, about a half mile away. The tires crunch over broken glass and detritus, the noise drawing the attention of nearby walkers.
From the passenger seat, Gus pumps a shell into the breech of his 12-gauge. “I got this, boss,” he says, rolling down his window.
“Gus, wait!” Martinez reaches down to a duffel bag stuffed between the seats. He finds a short-barrel .357 Magnum with a silencer attached, and hands it to the portly bald man. “Use this, I don’t want the noise drawing more of ’em.”
Gus puts the scattergun down, takes the revolver, opens the cylinder, checks the rounds, and then clicks it shut. “Fair enough.”
The bald man aims the revolver out the window and picks off three corpses with the ease of a man playing a carnival game. The blasts—muffled by the noise suppressor—sound like kindling snapping. The walkers fold one by one, the tops of their crania erupting in bubbles of black fluid and tissue, their bodies sagging to the pavement with satisfying wet thuds. Martinez proceeds west.
Martinez makes a turn at an intersection blocked by the wreckage of a three-car collision, the burned-out husks of metal and glass tangled in a crumpled mess. The cargo truck skirts the sidewalk, and Gus takes down another pair of walkers in tattered paramedic uniforms. The cargo truck continues down a side street.
Just past a boarded strip mall, the Piggly Wiggly sign comes into view on the south side of the street, the mouth of the deserted parking lot crowded with half a dozen walkers. Gus puts them out of their misery with little fuss—pausing once to reload—as the truck creeps slowly into the lot.
One of the walkers topples against the side of the truck, a fountain of oily blood washing across the hood before the body slides under the wheels.
“Fuck!” Martinez blurts as he pulls up to the front of the store.
Through the blood-smeared windshield, he can see the disaster area that is the former Piggly Wiggly. Broken paving stones and overturned flowerpots spray across the storefront, the windows all broken out and gaping jaggedly, rows of rusted-out carts lying either on their sides or smashed by fallen timbers. Inside the shadowy interior of the store, the aisles are ransacked, the shelves empty, the fixtures hanging by threads and slowly turning in the wind. “Fuck! Fuck!—Fuck!—Fuck-fuck-fuck!”
Martinez rubs his face, leaning back against the driver’s seat.
Gus looks at him. “So what now, boss?”
* * *
The tarp snaps open, the harsh light of day flooding the cargo hold. The glare makes Lilly blink and squint as her eyes adjust.
She rises to her feet and gazes down at Martinez standing outside the rear of the truck, holding the tarp open with a dour expression on his dark features. Gus stands behind him, wringing his hands. “Good news and bad news,” Martinez grumbles.
The Sterns stand up, Austin also slowly rising and stretching like a sleepy cat.
“Grocery store’s been trashed, cleaned out,” Martinez announces. “We’re S-O-L.”
Lilly looks at him. “What’s the good news?”
“There’s a warehouse out behind the store, no windows, locked up tight. Looks like people have left it alone. Could be a gold mine.”
“What are we waiting for?”
Martinez levels his gaze at Lilly. “Not sure how safe it is in there. I want everybody locked and loaded, and on their toes. Bring all the flashlights, too … looks like it’s pretty dark in there.”
They all reach for their weapons and gear. Lilly digs in her rucksack. She pulls out her guns—a pair of Ruger .22 semiautos—and checks the ammo magazines. She has two curved clips, each one loaded with twenty-five rounds. Bob taught her how to use the high-capacity mags, which make the pistols slightly unwieldy but also give her staying power if things get hectic.
“Austin, I want you carrying the duffels,” Martinez says, tipping a nod toward the pile of canvas bags in the corner. “Keep ’em open and ready.”
Austin is already standing over the bags, gathering them up and slinging them over his shoulder. The others check their ammo supplies, holstering their weapons in quick-release rigs on their hips and belts. Barbara shoves a Colt Army .45 down the back of a sash wrapped tightly around her thick midriff, David handing her two extra clips.
They work with the practiced concentration of veteran bank robbers. They’ve done this many times. Still, there’s a certain tension crackling around the dim enclosure as Martinez takes one last look through the open tarp. “Gonna pull around back,” he says. “Be ready to rock and roll, and watch your backs on the way in … the noise of the truck’s already drawn more biters.”
A quick succession of nods around the cargo hold, and Martinez vanishes.
Lilly goes over to the rear hatch and braces herself on the jamb as the sound of the cab doors slamming is followed by the revving engine. The truck lurches out of there and then rumbles around the side of the supermarket.
Forty-five seconds later, the air brakes hiss and the truck jerks to a stop.
Lilly takes a deep breath, draws one of the Rugers, pushes the tarp open, and hops out.
She lands hard on the cracked pavement, the sun in her eyes, the wind in her face, the smell of burning rubber wafting in from some far-off cataclysm. Martinez is already out of the cab, the .357 with the silencer holstered and banging on his thigh, Gus hustling around the front of the truck. The bald man climbs behind the wheel.
The warehouse sits off to their right, on the edge of the back lot, nestled in a jungle of weeds and razor grass, an enormous corrugated metal box the size of three movie theaters. Lilly sees the unmarked metal door at the top of a small flight of stairs, situated right next to the loading dock, and two huge rolling garage doors in the shadows of the overhang. Everything looks congealed and petrified with age, rusted shut, scarred with graffiti.
She glances over her shoulder and gets a glimpse of a cluster of walkers, a hundred yards away, out by the busted Piggly Wiggly sign, slowly turning toward the commotion and starting to shamble in their direction.
Austin comes up behind Lilly. “Let’s go, let’s go,” he mutters, lugging the duffel bags. “While we’re young and in one piece!”
David and Barbara come up fast behind Austin, the older couple staying low, with eyes wide and alert. Martinez gives a hand si
gnal to Gus, pointing off toward the loading dock. “Back it up, Gus, and keep the radio open and an eye on things outside.”
“Roger that.” Gus revs the engine, then starts to put the truck into gear.
“We’ll be coming out the loading dock side,” Martinez informs him. “So keep the engine running and be ready to roll at a moment’s notice.”
“Got it!”
Then things get moving very quickly, very efficiently, as Gus backs the truck up to the dock while the others swiftly and silently creep toward the unmarked side door, moving with the cold competence of a SWAT team. Martinez climbs stairs, pulls a long metal shim from his belt, and starts working on the padlock, pounding the shim with the butt of his gun. The others huddle behind him, glancing over their shoulders at the encroaching dead.
The lock snaps, and Martinez pries the door open on squeaking hinges.
They plunge into darkness and overwhelming stench—rotting meat, acrid pukelike smells, ammonia odors—the door slamming behind them, making them jump. A single skylight way up above the cobwebbed gantries provides barely enough illumination to reveal silhouettes of aisles and overturned forklifts scattered between the high shelves.
Each one of the intruders—including Lilly—pauses to smile as their eyes adjust enough to see all the canned goods and packaged food rising to the rafters. It is, indeed, the gold mine Martinez had hoped for. But as instantly as they all register their good luck, they hear the noises building in the deeper shadows, as if on cue with their arrival, and one by one their smiles fade—
—as they glimpse the first of the shadowy figures emerging from behind well-stocked shelves.
FOUR
On Martinez’s signal, they start firing, the collective snapping of silencers and flickering muzzle flashes lighting up the dark warehouse. Lilly gets off three quick blasts, and takes down two at a range of about fifty feet. One of the targets—an obese man in tattered work clothes, his flesh the color of earthworms—jerks against a shelf, his skull gushing cerebral fluids as he knocks over a row of canned tomatoes. The other biter—a younger male in greasy dungarees, perhaps a former forklift operator—collapses in a cascade of blood jetting out of the fresh hole in his skull.
The dead keep coming, at least two dozen or more, from every corner of the warehouse.
The air thumps and crackles with strobelike light, as the shooters stay clustered tight near the door, their gun barrels fanning out and blazing. Austin drops the duffels and starts working with his Glock 19, another acquisition from the National Guard depot, featuring a noise suppressor and an attachment below the barrel that sends a narrow thread of red light across the darkness. David picks off a female in a stained Piggly Wiggly uniform, sending the dead girl spinning against a rack of stale bagels. Barbara hits an older male in a blood-speckled dress shirt, clip-on tie, and name tag—maybe the former store manager—knocking the creature down in a red mist that paints a light fixture in pointillist profusion.
The dampened gunfire emits a surreal racket, like a round of mad applause, accompanied by a fireworks display ripping through the fetid stillness, followed by the jangle and clank of spent shells hitting the floor. Martinez edges forward, leading the group deeper into the warehouse. They pass perpendicular aisles and fire at lumbering figures with milky white eyes coming headlong toward them—former machinists, stock clerks, assistant managers, cashiers—each one collapsing in gushing baptisms of blood. They lose count by the time the last one sinks to the floor.
In the echoing silence, Lilly hears the metallic squawk of Gus’s voice coming through Martinez’s walkie-talkie. “—the hellfire is going on?! Y’all hear me?! Boss?! Y’all copy? What is going on?”
At the end of the main aisle, Martinez pauses to catch his breath. He grabs the radio clipped to his belt. “We’re good, Gus,” he says into the walkie’s mouthpiece. “Ran into a little welcoming party … but we’re clear.”
Over the air, the voice sizzles: “’Bout gave me a heart attack!”
Martinez thumbs the TALK button: “Whole fucking staff must have hid out in here when the shit went down.” He looks around at the carnage behind veils of blue smoke, the air stinking now of cordite. He thumbs the button. “You just be ready to roll, Gus. Looks like we’re gonna be loading the truck to the gills with goodies.”
The voice returns: “That’s good news, boss. Copy that. I’ll be ready.”
Martinez thumbs off the radio, puts it back, and turns to the others. “Everybody okay?”
Lilly’s ears ring, but she feels steady, alert. “All good,” she says, thumbing the catch on each of her Rugers, dumping the spent magazines, the clips clattering to the floor. She pulls fresh mags from the back of her waistband and slams them in place. She scans the aisles on either side of her, where the remains of walkers lie in gore-drenched heaps. She feels nothing.
“Keep an eye out for stragglers,” Martinez orders, glancing around the shadowy aisles.
“Damn this thing!” David Stern is complaining, shaking a flashlight. His gnarled hands tremble. “I checked the battery just last night.”
Barbara rolls her eyes in the darkness. “The man’s hopeless with technology.” She takes the flashlight from him. “I thought these batteries might be a little iffy.” She unscrews it and fiddles with the C-cells. It doesn’t help; the thing will not come on.
“Wait a second,” Austin says, shoving his Glock back behind his belt. “Got an idea.”
He goes over to a shelf on which bundles of firewood are stacked alongside sacks of charcoal briquettes, cans of lighter fluid, and packages of wood chips. He pulls a long piece of hardwood loose, pulls a bandanna from his pocket, and wraps it around the end of the log.
Lilly watches him with interest. She can’t quite figure this kid out. He seems older than his years somehow. She watches him douse the fabric with lighter fluid. He pulls a Bic and sparks the bandanna, and all at once a plume of brilliant orange light illuminates the center aisle in a radiant nimbus. “Very moody,” Lilly says with a smirk. “Nice work, Huckleberry.”
* * *
They split up into two groups. Martinez and the Sterns take the front of the building—a maze of shelves brimming with packaged goods, household supplies, dry goods, condiments, and kitchen staples—and Lilly and Austin take the rear. Martinez orders everybody to move quickly, no fucking around, and if they see something they’re not sure about, leave it. Take only the items with a shelf life.
Austin leads Lilly down a side corridor lined with deserted offices. They pass door after door, each of them locked and showing empty darkness behind their windows. Austin walks slightly ahead of Lilly, holding the torch high in one hand, the Glock in the other. Lilly has both her guns out, ready to rock at a moment’s notice.
In the flickering yellow light, they move past rows of propane tanks, garden supplies, sacks of fertilizer, cords of firewood, coils of garden hoses, and useless ephemera like bird feeders and garden gnomes. The skin on the back of Lilly’s neck prickles with goose bumps as she hears the echoing whispers and shuffling footsteps of the Sterns and Martinez coming from the darkness behind her.
At the end of the main aisle, against the back wall, they make a turn and discover a large hydraulic pallet jack sitting amid the rakes, shovels, and tools. Austin pulls the thing into the aisle—it’s a big greasy hand truck with heavy iron wheels and twin forks that protrude at least eight feet—and he tests it by pumping the huge hand jack. “This might just come in handy,” he speculates.
“Do me a favor, hold the torch up for a second.” Lilly indicates the shadows along the back wall. Austin raises the torch and reveals, in the dancing glow of torchlight, a pile of empty pallets.
They move quickly, slamming the forks under the closest pallet.
Then they head back down the dark center aisle, the wheels squeaking noisily on the filthy cement floor. They start loading the pallet, Austin pushing and holding the torch, and Lilly grabbing the essentials. They grab fifty-gal
lon jugs of drinking water, cartons of seeds, sharp-edged tools, coils of rope. They make another turn and head down an aisle of canned goods. Lilly starts working up a sweat stacking shrink-wrapped cartons of peaches, corn, beans, collards, tins of sardines, tuna, and Spam.
“Gonna be heroes, comin’ back with all this shit,” Austin grunts as he shoves the jack along the aisle.
“Yeah, maybe you’ll finally get laid,” Lilly cracks, stacking the heavy trays with a groan.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“What.”
“Where’s this attitude come from?”
Lilly keeps working, her guns digging into the back of her belt. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, Lilly … I noticed it right away … ever since I met you … you got a chip on your shoulder about something.”
They work their way toward the end of the canned goods aisle. Lilly slams another carton of cans on the pallet and grumbles, “Can we just get this thing done, and get the hell outta here?”
“Just making conversation,” Austin says as he shoves the dolly around the end of the aisle with a grunt.
They head down another aisle stacked with crates of rotted fruit. They pause. Austin holds the torch up and reveals the blackened, shriveled peaches and bananas in their maggot-infested crates. The fruit has decomposed into slimy black lumps.
Lilly wipes the sweat from her face, her voice coming out low and hoarse. “The truth is, I lost some people very close to me.”
Austin stares at the rotten fruit. “Look … I’m sorry I brought it up … I’m sorry.” He starts shoving the dolly deeper into the aisle. “You don’t have to—”
“Wait!”
Lilly grabs him, holds him still. A faint metallic tapping noise straightens her spine, and she whispers, “Shine the torch over there.”
In the flickering glow, they see a row of freezer doors along the left side of the aisle. The stench of rancid meat hangs in the air. Lilly pulls her guns. The last door on the left is intermittently jiggling and creaking, the rusty hinges loose.
The Walking Dead Collection Page 65
