FIFTEEN
On the west side of town, within the walled area, inside a second-story apartment near the post office, Bob Stookey hears a knock. Sitting up against the headboard of a brass bed, he puts down his dog-eared paperback book—a Louis L’Amour western called The Outlaws of Mesquite—and steps into his scuffed loafers. He pulls on his pants. He has some trouble with the zipper, his hands fumbling.
After drinking himself insensate earlier that evening, he still feels wonky and disconnected. The dizziness tugs at his focus and his stomach lurches, as he staggers out of the room and crosses the apartment to the side door, which opens out onto the darkness of a wooden landing at the top of a staircase. Bob belches and swallows bile as he pushes the door open.
“Bob … something horrible has … Oh, God, Bob,” Megan Lafferty sobs from the shadows of the staircase. Her face wet and drawn, her eyes sunken and red, she looks as though she’s about to shatter apart like a glass figurine. She trembles in the cold, holding the collar of her denim jacket tight against the bitter winds.
“Come in, darlin’, c’mon in,” Bob says, pushing the door wider, his heart beating a little faster. “What in God’s name happened?”
Megan staggers into the kitchen. Bob takes her by the arms and helps her over to a hard chair canted next to the cluttered dining table. She flops down in her chair and tries to speak but the sobs won’t let her. Bob kneels by her chair, stroking her shoulder as she cries. She buries her face in his chest and cries.
Bob holds her. “It’s okay, darlin’ … whatever it is … we’ll figure it out.”
She moans—gut shot with anguish and horror—her tears soaking his sleeveless undershirt. He cradles her head, stroking her damp curls. After an agonizing moment, she looks up at him. “Scott’s dead.”
“What!”
“I saw him, Bob.” She speaks in hitching gasps, her sobs shuddering through her. “He’s … he’s dead and … he’s turned into one of those things.”
“Easy, darlin’, take a breath and try to tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know what happened!”
“Where did you see him?”
She sniffs back the gasps and then tells Bob in broken, half-formed sentences about the severed heads bobbing in the darkness.
“Where did you see this?”
She hyperventilates. “In the … over in … in the Governor’s place.”
“The Governor’s place? You saw Scott at the Governor’s place?”
She nods and nods. She tries to explain but the words are caught in her throat.
Bob strokes her arm. “Darlin,’ what were you doing in the Governor’s place?”
She tries to speak. The sobs return. She buries her face in her hands.
“Let me get you some water,” Bob says at last. He hurries over to the sink and runs water into a plastic cup. Half the homes in Woodbury have no utilities, no heat or power or running water. The lucky few who still have these amenities are members of the Governor’s inner circle—those to whom the makeshift power structure has bestowed perks. Bob has become a sort of sentimental favorite, and his private quarters reflect this status. Littered with empty bottles and food wrappers, tins of pipe tobacco and girlie magazines, warm blankets and electronic gadgets, the apartment has taken on the look of a shabby man-cave.
Bob brings the water over to Megan, and she gulps it from the plastic cup, some of it seeping out the sides of her mouth and soaking her jacket. Bob gently helps her remove her coat as she finishes the water. He looks away when he sees the front of her blouse buttoned haphazardly, open at the navel, a series of red blotches and deep scratches running down the length of her sternum between her pale breasts. Her bra is askew and one of her nipples shows prominently.
“Here, darlin’,” he says, turning toward the linen closet in the front hall. He retrieves a blanket, comes back and tenderly wraps it around her. She gets her crying under control until the sobs have subsided into a series of jerky, shuddering breaths. She stares downward. Her tiny hands lie limp and upturned in her lap, as though she has forgotten how to use them.
“I never should have…” she starts to explain and then chokes back the words. Her nose runs and she wipes it. Her eyes close. “What have I done … Bob … what the f*ck is wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says softly and puts his arm around her. “I’m with you now, honey. I’ll take care of you.”
She settles down in his arms. Soon she is leaning her head on his shoulder and breathing more regularly. Soon her breaths are coming in low, thick wheezes, as though she might be falling asleep. Bob recognizes the symptoms of shock. Her flesh feels ice-cold in his arms. He wraps the blanket tighter. She nuzzles his neck.
Bob takes deep breaths, waves of emotion slamming through him.
Holding the woman tightly, he gropes for words. His mind races with contrary feelings. He is repulsed by Megan’s story of severed heads and Scott Moon’s dismembered corpse, as well as the fact that she paid the Governor such a questionable visit in the first place. But Bob is also overcome with unrequited desire. The nearness of her lips, the soft whisper of her breath on his collarbone, and the luster of her wild-strawberry roan curls brushing his chin—all of it intoxicates Bob faster and more profusely than a case of twelve-year-old bourbon. He fights the urge to kiss the top of her head.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he murmurs softly in her ear. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Oh, Bob…” Her voice sounds fuzzy, maybe still slightly high. “Bob…”
“Gonna be okay,” he says in her ear, stroking her hair with his greasy, gnarled hand.
She cranes her head up and plants a kiss on his grizzled jawline.
Bob closes his eyes and lets the wave pour over him.
* * *
They sleep together that night, and at first Bob panics at the prospect of being in such close and intimate proximity with Megan for such a long period of time. Bob has not had sex with a woman in eleven years, not since he and his late wife, Brenda, stopped having relations. Decades of drink have put the kibosh on Bob’s virility. But desire still glows within him like a smoldering ember—and he wants Megan so badly tonight he can taste it like Everclear in the back of his throat, like a finger prodding the base of his spine.
The two of them sleep restlessly in each other’s arms, tangled in sweaty blankets on the double bed in the back room. Much to Bob’s relief, they do not even remotely come close to having sex.
Throughout the night, Bob’s feverish thoughts vacillate between half-formed dreams of making love to Megan Lafferty on a desert island, surrounded by zombie-infested waters, and sudden moments of bleary wakefulness in the shadows of that second-floor bedroom. Bob marvels at the miracle of hearing Megan’s arrhythmic breathing next to him, the warmth of her hip nested against his belly, the wonder of her hair in his face, her musky-sweet scent filling his senses. In a strange way he feels whole for the first time since the plague broke out. He feels an oddly invigorating sense of hope. The troubling undercurrents of suspicion and mixed emotions about the Governor melt away in the dark limbo of that bedroom, and the momentary peace that washes over Bob Stookey eventually lulls him into a deep sleep.
Just after dawn he comes awake with a start to a piercing shriek.
At first he thinks he’s still dreaming. The scream comes from somewhere outside, and it registers in Bob’s ears as a ghostly echo, as if the tail end of a nightmare has just brushed across his waking state. In his half-conscious daze he reaches over for Megan and finds her side of the bed empty. The blankets are bunched at his feet. Megan is gone. He sits up with a jolt.
“Megan, honey?”
He gets out of bed and starts toward the door, the floor like ice on his bare feet, when another shriek pierces the winter winds outside his apartment. He does not notice the overturned chair in the kitchen, the drawers open, the cabinet doors agape, the signs of someone rifling through his belongings.
“Megan?”
He races toward the side door, which is partially ajar and banging in the wind.
“Megan!”
He pushes through the doorway and stumbles out onto the second-floor landing, blinking at the harsh, overcast light and the cold wind in his face.
“MEGAN!!”
At first he cannot take in all the movement and commotion around the building. He sees people gathered down below the stairs, across the street, and along the edge of the post office parking lot—maybe a dozen or so—and they’re all pointing at Bob or perhaps at something on the roof. It’s hard to tell. Heart hammering, Bob starts down the stairs. He does not notice the coil of towrope wound around the pilasters of the landing until he reaches the bottom of the stairs.
Bob turns and goes as cold and still as granite. “Oh, Lord, no,” he utters, gazing up at the body dangling from the landing, swaying in the wind, turning lazily. “Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”
Megan hangs by a makeshift noose around her neck, her face as discolored and livid as antique porcelain.
* * *
Lilly Caul hears the commotion outside her window above the dry cleaner, and drags herself out of bed. She throws open the shade and sees townspeople gathered outside their doorways, some of them pointing off toward the post office with anxious expressions, speaking under their breaths. Lilly senses that something terrible has happened, and when she sees the Governor striding quickly along the sidewalk in his long coat with his goons, Gabe and Bruce, at his side, snapping ammo magazines into assault weapons, she dresses quickly.
It takes her less than three minutes to throw on her clothes, hustle down the back stairs, make her way down an alley between two buildings, and cross the two and a half blocks to the post office.
The sky churns with menacing clouds, the wind spitting sleet, and by the time Lilly sees the crowd milling about the base of Bob’s stairs, she knows she’s seeing the aftermath of something awful. She can tell by the expressions on the faces of the onlookers, and she can tell by the way the Governor is talking to Bob off to the side, each man gazing at the ground as they talk softly to each other, their faces screwed up with anxiety and grim resolve.
Within the circle of onlookers, Gabe and Bruce kneel on the pavement next to a sheet-covered lump, and the sight of that shrouded heap stops Lilly cold. She stands on the periphery, staring, a trickle of icy dread running down her spine. The sight of another pall-covered body on a street corner strums a terrible chord deep within her.
“Lilly?”
She turns and sees Martinez standing next to her, his leather jacket crisscrossed with a bandolier of bullets. He puts a hand on her shoulder. “She was a friend of yours, wasn’t she?”
“Who is it?”
“Nobody told you?”
“Is it Megan?” Lilly pushes her way past Martinez, shoving aside several onlookers. “What happened?”
Bob Stookey steps into her path, blocking her progress, gently taking her by the shoulders. “Lil, wait, there’s nothing you can do.”
“What happened, Bob?” Lilly blinks at the sting in her eyes, the heavy fist in her chest. “Did a walker get her? Let me go!”
Bob holds fast on her shoulders. “No, ma’am. That’s not what happened.” Lilly notices Bob’s eyes, raw and red rimmed, cratered out with grief. His face trembles with anguish. “These fellas will take care of her.”
“Is she—”
“She’s gone, Lil.” Bob looks down and softly shakes his head. “Took her own life.”
“What— What happened?”
Still looking down, Bob mumbles something about not being sure.
“Let me go, Bob!” Lilly pushes her way through the row of onlookers.
“Whoa! Whoa—slow down there, sister!” Gabe stands up and blocks Lilly’s path. The heavyset man with the bullish neck and flattop haircut holds on to Lilly’s arm. “I know she was a friend of yours—”
“Let me see her!” Lilly yanks her arm free but Gabe grabs her from behind and puts her in a firm shoulder lock. Lilly wriggles furiously. “LET GO OF ME, GODDAMMIT!”
Ten feet away, on the seared brown grass of the parkway, Bruce, the tall black man with the shaved head, kneels by the sheet-draped body, loading a .45 caliber semiautomatic with a fresh magazine. His face grim and set, he breathes deeply, preparing to complete some distasteful task. He ignores the commotion behind him.
“LET GO!” Lilly keeps writhing in the portly man’s grip, her gaze locked on the body.
“Calm down,” Gabe hisses. “You’re making this harder than it has to—”
“Let her go!”
The deep, cigarette-cured voice comes from behind Gabe, and both Lilly and the heavyset man freeze as though startled by an ultrasonic whistle.
They glance over their shoulders and see the Governor standing inside the circle of onlookers with his hands on his hips, his twin pearl-handled army .45s thrust into either side of his belt, gunslinger-style, his long rock-star hair—as black as India ink—bound in a ponytail and tossing in the wind. The crow’s-feet around his eyes, and the lines chiseling his sunken jowls, deepen and crease and grow more prominent as his expression darkens. “It’s okay, Gabe … let the lady say good-bye to her friend.”
Lilly rushes over to the corpse on the ground, kneels, and stares at the shrouded heap, putting her hand to her mouth as though holding in the tide of emotions rising in her. Bruce thumbs the safety down on his semiauto, and awkwardly backs away, standing, gazing down at Lilly as the crowd around them quiets down.
The Governor comes over and stands a respectful five feet away.
Lilly peels back the sheet and clenches her teeth, as she looks at the purplish-gray face of the woman that used to be Megan Lafferty. Eyes swollen shut, jaw set with rigor mortis, the bloodless china-doll face looks as though it has shattered into a million hairline fractures, the dark capillaries apparent now in the early stages of decomposition. The face is ghastly but also excruciatingly poignant to Lilly, wrenching her memories back to those crazy days at Sprayberry High School when the two girls would get high in the restroom and climb up on the school’s roof and throw pebbles at the jocks running drills behind the basketball courts. Megan had been Lilly’s best gal-pal for years, and despite the girl’s faults—and there had been many—Lilly still thinks of her as a best friend. Now Lilly cannot stop staring at this unrecognizable vestige of her feisty friend.
Lilly gasps as Megan’s swollen, purple-lidded eyes suddenly pop open, revealing milk-glass pupils.
Lilly does not move as the black man with the shaved head crowds in, the .45 poised to fire a direct blast into the cadaver’s head. But before the hammer has a chance to fall, the sound of the Governor’s voice calls out: “Hold your fire, Bruce!”
Bruce glances over his shoulder, as the Governor takes a step closer, and then says very softly, “Let her do it.”
Lilly looks up at the man in the long coat, blinks, and says nothing. Her heart feels like ash, her blood running cold in her veins. Way off in the distance the sky rumbles with thunder.
The Governor steps closer. “Go ahead, Bruce. Give her the gun.”
An endless moment passes, and somehow the gun ends up in Lilly’s hand. Beneath her, the thing that was once Megan Lafferty convulses and tenses on the ground, its nervous system dieseling, its mouth peeling away from moldering gray teeth. Lilly can barely see through her tears.
“Put your friend down, Lilly,” the Governor urges softly from behind her.
Lilly raises the gun. Megan’s neck cranes upward toward her like a fetus emerging from its embryonic fluid, teeth clacking hungrily. Lilly puts the muzzle against the monster’s brow.
“Do it, Lilly. Put her out of her misery.”
Lilly closes her eyes. The trigger pad burns her finger like an icicle. When she opens her eyes again the thing on the ground lunges at her, the rancid teeth going for Lilly’s jugular.
It happens so quickly it almost fails to register in Lilly’s brain.
The blast rings out.
Lilly topples backward, falling on her ass, the .45 slipping out of her hand as the top of Megan’s cranium erupts in dark red mist, painting the sidewalk adjacent to the parkway in a spray of brain matter. The reanimated corpse sags and lies still on the tangled shroud—its sharklike eyes fixed on the dark sky.
For a moment Lilly lies supine on the ground, staring at the clouds, gripped in a state of confusion. Who fired the kill shot? Lilly never pulled the trigger. Who did the deed? Lilly blinks away her tears and manages to focus on the Governor standing over her, his grave expression fixed on something to his right.
Bob Stookey stands over the corpse of Megan Lafferty with a .38 police special still clutched in his hand, his shooting arm dangling at his side, a thin wisp of gun smoke still curling out of the barrel.
The desolation on Bob’s weathered, deeply lined face is heartbreaking.
* * *
Those next few days, nobody pays much attention to the changing weather.
Bob is too busy drinking himself to death to notice anything as trivial as weather fronts, and Lilly occupies herself arranging a proper burial for Megan in a plot next to Josh. The Governor spends most of his time preparing for the next big battle in the racetrack arena. He has big plans for the next round of shows, integrating zombies into the gladiatorial matches.
Gabe and Bruce busy themselves with the nasty job of hacking up the dead guardsmen in an auxiliary warehouse beneath the track. The Governor needs body parts to feed the growing menagerie of zombies being housed in a secret room deep in the cinder-block catacombs. Gabe and Bruce enlist some of the younger men from Martinez’s crew to work the chain saws in the festering, cavernous abattoir next to the morgue, rendering human remains into meat.
Meanwhile, the January rains move into the area with slow, insidious menace.
At first, the outer bands of the storm system cause very little alarm—a few scattered showers swelling the storm sewers and icing the streets—with temperatures hovering above freezing. But the distant lightning and roiling black skies on the western horizon begin to worry people. Nobody knows with any degree of certainty—nor will they ever know—why this winter turns out to be anomalous for Georgia. The state’s relatively mild winters can be occasionally shattered by torrential rains, a nasty snowfall or two, or an ice storm here and there, but no one is prepared for what is about to sweep down across the fruit belt on a low-pressure cell slamming in from Canada.
The National Weather Service out of Peachtree City—still limping along on generators and shortwave radios—issues an early warning that week on as many frequencies as they can spark. But very few listeners benefit from the news. Only a handful of souls hear the frantic voice of the harried meteorologist, Barry Gooden, ranting about the blizzard of ’93 and the floods of 2009.
According to Gooden, the bitter cold front that will smash down upon the American South over the next twenty-four hours will collide with the moist, mild, warm surface temperatures of central Georgia and very likely make these other winter storms seem like passing sprinkles. With seventy-mile-an-hour winds in the forecast, as well as dangerous lightning and a mixture of rain and sleet, the storm promises to play unprecedented havoc with the plague-ridden state. Not only will the volatile swings in temperature threaten to turn the gulley washers into blizzards, but—as the state learned only a couple of years earlier, and now with the advent of the plague—Georgians are woefully unprepared for the ravages of flooding.
A few years back, a major storm pushed the Chattahoochee River over its banks and into the highly populated areas around Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Marietta. Mudslides tore homes from their foundations. Highways lay underwater and the catastrophe resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. But this year—this monster forming over the Mississippi, unfurling at an alarming rate of speed—promises to be off the charts.
The first signs of extraordinary weather roar into town that Friday afternoon.
By nightfall the rain is coming down at a forty-five-degree angle on fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, falling in sheets against Woodbury’s barricade, making defunct high-tension wires across the center of town sing and snap like bullwhips. Volleys of lightning turn the dark alleys to silver flickering photographic negatives, and the gutters spill over across Main Street. Most of Woodbury’s inhabitants hunker down inside for the duration … leaving the sidewalks and boarded storefronts deserted …
… mostly deserted, that is, except for a group of four residents, who brave the rains in order to gather surreptitiously in an office beneath the racetrack.
* * *
“Leave the light off, Alice, if you don’t mind,” a voice says from the shadows behind a desk. The dull glimmer of wire-framed spectacles floating in the darkness is the only thing that identifies Dr. Stevens. The muffled drumming of the storm punctuates the silence.
Alice nods and stands near the light switch, nervously rubbing her cold hands against each other. Her lab coat looks ghostly in the gloomy, windowless office that Stevens has been using for a storage room.
“You called this meeting, Lilly,” murmurs Martinez from the opposite corner of the room, where he sits on a stool, smoking a cheroot—the slender cigar’s glowing tip like a firefly in the darkness. “What are you thinking?”
Lilly paces in the shadows near a row of metal filing cabinets. She wears one of Josh’s army surplus raincoats, which is so big on her she looks like a child playing dress-up. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking I’m not going to live like this anymore.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this place is rotten to the core, it’s sick, and this Governor dude is the sickest one of all, and I don’t see things getting any better in the foreseeable future.”
“And…?”
She shrugs. “I’m looking at my options.”
“Which are?”
She paces some more, choosing her words carefully. “Packing up and taking off by myself seems suicidal … but I’d be willing to take my chances out there if it was the only way to get away from this shit.”
Martinez looks at Stevens, who is across the room, wiping his eyeglasses with a cloth and listening intently. The two men share an uneasy glance. Finally Stevens speaks up: “You mentioned options.”
Lilly stops pacing. She looks at Martinez. “These guys you work with on the fence … you trust them?”
Martinez takes a drag off the cheroot, and smoke forms a wreath around his face. “More or less.”
“Some more and some less?”
He shrugs. “You could say that, yeah.”
“But these guys you trust more than the others, would they back you up in a pinch?”
Martinez stares at her. “What are we talking about here, Lilly?”
Lilly takes a deep breath. She has no idea if she can trust these people, but they also seem like the only sane individuals in Woodbury. She decides to play her hand. After a long pause, she says very softly, “I’m talking about regime change.”
Another series of apprehensive glances pass between Martinez, Stevens, and Alice. The edgy silence throbs with the muffled noise of the storm. The winds have kicked up even higher, and thunder rattles the foundation with increasing frequency.
At last the doctor says, “Lilly, I don’t think you know what you’re—”
“No!” she interrupts him, looking at the floor, speaking in a cold, flat monotone. “No more history lessons, Doc. We’re past that now. Past playing it safe. This dude Philip Blake has to go … and you know it as well as I do.”
Over their heads a volley of thunder reverberates. Stevens lets out an anguished sigh. “You’re going to buy yourself a gig in the gladiator ring, you keep talking like that.”
Unfazed, Lilly looks up at Martinez. “I don’t know you very well, Martinez, but you seem like a fairly even-tempered kind of guy … kind of guy who could lead a revolt, get things back on track.”
Martinez stares at her. “Slow down, kiddo … you’re gonna hurt yourself.”
“Whatever … you don’t have to listen to me … I don’t care anymore.” She makes eye contact with each of them, one at a time. “But you all know I’m right. Things are going to get a lot worse around here, we don’t do something about this. You want to turn me in for treason, fine, go ahead. Whatever. But we may never get another chance to take this freak down. And I for one am not going to sit on my hands and do nothing while this place goes down in flames and more and more innocent people die. You know I’m right about this.” She looks back down at the floor. “The Governor has to go.”
Another barrage of thunder rattles the ribs of the building, as the silence in the storage room stretches. Finally Alice speaks up.
“She’s right, you know.”