NINE
On their third day in town, the winter rains roll in, drawing a dark gray pall of misery down over Woodbury. It’s already early December and Thanksgiving has come and gone without so much as a wishbone being snapped, and now the dampness as well as the cold starts getting into people’s joints. The sandy lots along Main Street turn to wet plaster and the sewers swell and overflow with tainted runoff. A human hand bubbles out of one of the gratings.
That day Josh decides to trade his best chef’s knife—a Japanese Shun—for bed linens and towels and soap, and he convinces Lilly to move her things into the apartment over the dry cleaner, where they can take sponge baths and find temporary refuge from the cramped quarters of the camper. Lilly stays indoors most of the day, fervently writing diary entries on a roll of wrapping paper and planning her escape. Josh keeps a close eye on her. Something feels wrong—more wrong than he can articulate.
Scott and Megan are nowhere to be found. Lilly suspects that Megan, already growing bored with Scott, is prostituting herself for dope.
That afternoon Bob Stookey finds a couple of kindred spirits in the bowels of the racetrack, where a labyrinth of cinder-block storage facilities and service areas has been turned into a makeshift infirmary. While the cold-steel rain pummels the metal beams and stanchions of the arena above them—sending a dull, hissing, incessant drone down through the bones of the building—a middle-aged man and a young woman give Bob the grand tour.
“Alice here has been a quick study as a neophyte nurse, I have to say,” the man in the wire-frame reading glasses and stained lab coat comments, as he leads Bob and the young lady through an open doorway and into a cluttered examination room. The man’s name is Stevens, and he’s a trim, intelligent, wry sort who seems out of place to Bob in this feral town. The ersatz nurse, also in a hand-me-down lab coat, looks younger than her years. Her dishwater-blond hair is braided and pulled back from her girlish face.
“I’m still working at it,” the girl says, following the men into the dimly lit room, the floor humming with the vibrations of a central generator. “I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of second-year nursing school.”
“Both y’all know a lot more than I do,” Bob admits. “I’m just an old battle tech.”
“She had her baptism of fire last month, God knows,” the doctor says, pausing next to a battered X-ray machine. “Business was brisk down here for a while.”
Bob looks around the room, sees the bloodstains and the signs of chaotic triage, and he asks what happened.
The doctor and the nurse share an uneasy glance. “Changeover in power.”
“Excuse me?”
The doctor sighs. “Place like this, you see a kind of natural selection going on. Only the pure sociopaths survive. It’s not pretty.” He takes a breath, and then smiles at Bob. “Still, it’s good to have a medic around.”
Bob wipes his mouth. “Not sure how much help I’d be, but I gotta admit, it sure would be nice to lean on the skills of a real doctor for once.” Bob motions at one of the old, battered machines. “I see y’all got an old Siemens machine there, used to truck one of those around Afghanistan.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not exactly Bellevue but we’ve got the basics, scavenged them from area clinics … got infusion pumps, IV drips, a couple monitors, ECG, EEG … we’re light on the pharmacy, though.”
Bob tells them about the medicine he scavenged from Walmart. “You’re welcome to any or all of it,” he says. “I got a couple of spare doctor’s bags full of the usual. Got extra dressings, you name it. It’s yours, you need it.”
“That’s great, Bob. Where you from?”
“Vicksburg originally, was living in Smyrna when the Turn came. How about you folks?”
“Atlanta,” Stevens replies. “Had a small practice in Brookhaven before everything went to hell.”
“Also from Atlanta,” the girl chimes in. “Was going to school at Georgia State.”
Stevens has a pleasant look on his face. “You been drinking, Bob?”
“Huh?”
Stevens gestures toward the silver flask partially visible in Bob’s hip pocket. “You been drinking today?”
Bob lowers his head, crestfallen, ashamed. “Yessir, I have.”
“You drink every day, Bob?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hard liquor?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Bob, I don’t mean to put you on the spot.” The doctor pats Bob’s shoulder. “It’s none of my business. I’m not judging you. But can I ask how much you’re putting away every day?”
Bob’s chest tightens with humiliation. Alice gazes elsewhere for a moment, out of respect. Bob swallows his shame. “I have no earthly idea. Sometimes a couple of pints, sometimes a whole fifth when I can get it.” Bob looks up at the slender, bespectacled doctor. “I’ll understand if you don’t want me getting near your—”
“Bob, relax. You don’t understand. I think it’s fantastic.”
“Huh?”
“Keep drinking. Drink as much as possible.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You mind sharing a sip?”
Bob slowly pulls the flask, not taking his eyes off the doctor.
“Appreciate it.” Stevens takes the flask, nods a thank-you, and takes a pull. He wipes his mouth and offers it to Alice.
The girl waves it off. “No, thanks, it’s a little early in the day for me.”
Stevens takes another sip and hands the flask back. “You stay here for any length of time you’re gonna need to drink heavily.”
Bob puts the flask back in his pocket. He doesn’t say anything.
Stevens smiles again, and there’s something heartbreaking behind the smile. “That’s my prescription, Bob. Stay as drunk as possible.”
* * *
On the other side of the racetrack complex, beneath the north end of the arena, a wiry, tightly coiled individual emerges from an unmarked metal door and gazes up at the sky. The rain has ceased for the moment, leaving behind a low ceiling of sooty clouds. The wiry gentleman carries a small bundle wrapped in a threadbare woolen blanket the color of dead grass, gathered at the top with rawhide.
The wiry man crosses the street and starts down the sidewalk, his raven-black hair slick with moisture and pulled back in a ponytail today.
As he walks, his preternaturally alert gaze is everywhere, practically all at once, taking in everything that goes on around him. In recent weeks the emotions that have plagued him have subsided, the voice in his head silent now. He feels strong. This town is his raison d’être, the fuel that keeps him keen and sharp.
He is about to turn the corner at the intersection of Canyon and Main when he notices a figure in his peripheral vision. The older guy—the drunk who came in a few days ago with the nigger and the girls—is emerging from the warehouse at the south end of the racetrack. The weathered old dude pauses for a moment to take a gulp from his flask, and the look on his face after swallowing and cringing at the burn is apparent to the wiry man even a block away.
In the distance, the older dude grimaces as the alcohol streams down his gullet, and the grimace is weirdly familiar to the wiry man. The grimace—full of shame and desolation—makes the wiry man feel strange and sentimental, almost tender. The older man puts the flask away and starts trundling toward Main Street with that trademark gait—half limp, half drunken amble—which many homeless people get after years of struggling on the street. The wiry man follows.
Minutes later, the wiry man cannot resist calling out to the juicer. “Hey, sport!”
* * *
Bob Stookey hears the voice—gravelly, lightly accented with a trace of Southern small town, echoing on the breeze—but he cannot locate the source.
Bob pauses at the edge of Main Street and looks around. The town is mostly deserted today, the rains driving denizens indoors.
“‘Bob’ is it?” the voice says, closer now, and Bob finally sees a figure approaching from behind.
“Oh, hi … how ya doin’?”
The man saunters up to Bob with a forced smile. “I’m doing great, Bob, thanks.” Wisps of coal-black hair dangling in front of the man’s chiseled face, he carries a bundle that seems to be leaking moisture, dripping on the pavement. People around town have started to call this man “the Governor”—the name has stuck—which is fine and dandy with this guy. “How you settling in to our little hamlet?”
“Real good.”
“You meet Doc Stevens?”
“Yes, sir. Good man.”
“Call me ‘the Governor.’” The smile softens a bit. “Everybody else seems to be calling me that. What the hell? Kinda like the ring of it.”
“The Governor it is,” Bob says, and glances down at the bundle in the man’s grip. The blanket leaks blood. Bob glances away quickly, alarmed by it, but feigning ignorance. “Looks like the rains have blown over.”
The man’s smile remains stamped on his face. “Walk with me, Bob.”
“Sure.”
They start down the cracked sidewalk, moving toward the temporary wall that stands between merchant’s row and the outer streets. The sound of nail guns snapping can be heard above the wind. The wall continues expanding along the southern edge of the business district. “You remind me of somebody,” the Governor says after a long pause.
“It ain’t Kate Winslet, I’m betting.” Bob has had enough alcohol to loosen his tongue. He chuckles to himself as he trundles along. “Or Bonnie Raitt, neither.”
“Touché, Bob.” The Governor glances down at his package, notices the droplets of blood leaving little coin-sized marks on the sidewalk. “What a mess I’m making.”
Bob looks away, scrambles to change the subject. “Ain’t y’all worried about all that pounding racket over there drawing walkers?”
“We got it under control, Bob, don’t you worry about that. Got men posted out on the edge of the woods, and we try and keep the pounding down to a minimum.”
“That’s good to hear … got things figured out pretty good around here.”
“We try, Bob.”
“I told Doc Stevens, he’s welcome to any medical supplies I got in my stash.”
“You a doctor, too?”
Bob tells the man about Afghanistan, patching marines, getting an honorable discharge.
“You got kids, Bob?”
“No, sir … for the longest time it was just me and Brenda, my old lady. Had a little trailer outside of Smyrna, not a bad life.”
“You’re looking at my little bundle, aren’t ya, Bob?”
“No, sir … whatever it is, it’s none of my beeswax. Doesn’t concern me.”
“Where’s your wife?”
Bob slows down a bit, as though the mere subject of Brenda Stookey weighs him down. “Lost her to a walker attack shortly after the Turn.”
“Sorry to hear that.” They approach a gated section of the wall. The Governor pauses, knocks a few times, and the seam opens. Litter swirls as a workman pulls the gate back and nods at the Governor, letting the twosome pass. “My place is just up the road a piece,” the Governor says with a tilt of his head toward the east side of town. “Little two-story apartment building … come on over, I’ll fix you a drink.”
“The Governor’s mansion?” Bob jokes. He can’t help it. The nerves and the booze are working on him. “Ain’t you got laws to pass?”
The Governor pauses, turns and smiles at Bob. “I just figured out who you remind me of.”
* * *
In that brief instant, standing in that gray overcast daylight, the wiry man—who from this point on shall think of himself as “the Governor”—experiences a seismic shift within his brain. He stands there staring at a coarse, deeply lined, alcoholic good old boy from Smyrna who is the spitting image of Ed Blake, the Governor’s old man. Ed Blake had that same pug nose, prominent brow, and crow’s-feet around red-rimmed eyes. Ed Blake was a big drinker, too, like this guy, with the same sense of humor. Ed Blake would toss off sarcastic one-liners with the same drunken relish, cutting to the quick with his words when he wasn’t slapping his family around with the back of his big, callused hands.
All at once, another part of the Governor bubbles up to the surface—a deeply buried part of him—on a wave of sentimental longing, which almost makes him dizzy as he remembers big Ed Blake in happier times, a simple hillbilly laborer who tried to fight his demons long enough to be a loving father. “You remind me of somebody I used to know a long time ago,” the Governor says finally, his tone softening as he looks Bob Stookey in the eyes. “C’mon, let’s go get a drink.”
For the rest of their journey across the safe zone, the two men talk quietly, openly, like old friends.
At one point the Governor asks Bob what happened to his wife.
“Place we lived, this mobile home park…” Bob says slowly, heavily, as he hobbles along, remembering dark days. “We got overrun one day with walkers. I was out trying to scrounge up some supplies when it happened … by the time I got back they had gotten into our place.”
He pauses and the Governor says nothing, just walks in silence, waiting.
“They were tearing into her, and I fought ’em off best I could … and … I guess they only ate enough of her that she came back.”
Another agonizing pause. Bob licks his dry lips. The Governor can see that the man needs a drink badly, needs his medicine to stanch the memories.
“I couldn’t bring myself to finish her off.” This comes out of Bob on a choked wheeze. His rheumy eyes well up. “I ain’t proud of the fact that I left her. Pretty sure she got some folks after that. Her arm and her lower body was pretty mangled but she could still get around. Them people she got, their deaths are my fault.”
A pause.
“It’s hard to let go sometimes,” the Governor ventures at last, glancing down at his ghastly little bundle. The dripping has diminished somewhat, the blood thickening to the consistency of blackstrap molasses. Right then the Governor notices Bob pondering the blood droplets, his brow furrowed in thought. He looks almost sober.
Bob gestures at the gruesome bundle. “You got somebody turned on ya, don’t ya?”
“You’re not so dumb … are ya, Bob?”
Bob wipes his mouth pensively. “Never thought about feeding Brenda.”
“C’mon, Bob, I want to show you something.”
They reach the two-story brick edifice at the end of the block, and Bob follows the Governor inside.
* * *
“Stand behind me for a second, Bob.” The Governor fiddles a key into a dead bolt, the door at the end of a second-floor hallway. The door clicks, and the sound of a low growl seeps out. “I would appreciate it, Bob, if you kept what you’re about to see to yourself.”
“No problem … lips are sealed.”
Bob follows the Governor into a two-bedroom unit with spartan furnishings that reeks of spoiled meat and disinfectant, the windows painted over with black Rust-Oleum. A floor-length mirror near the front vestibule is covered with newspaper and masking tape. The mirror in the bathroom—visible through an open doorway—is missing, its absence evident in the pale oval outline above the sink. All the mirrors in this place have been removed.
“She’s everything to me,” the Governor says. Bob follows the man across the living room, down a short hallway, and through a doorway into a cramped laundry room, where the upright corpse of a little girl is chained to a U-bolt drilled into the wall.
“Oh, Lord.” Bob keeps his distance. The dead girl—still in pigtails and pinafore dress, as if dressed for church—snarls and spits and flails, her chain straining at its mooring. Bob takes a step back. “Oh, Lord.”
“Calm down, Bob.”
The Governor kneels in front of the pint-sized zombie and lays the bundle on the floor. The girl bites at the air, blackened teeth clacking. The Governor unwraps a human head, its cranial cavity gaping on one side from a close-range gunshot.
“Oh, my.” Bob notices that the human head—its pulpy concavity on one side already hectic with maggots—sports a bristly, jarhead haircut, as if it once belonged to a soldier or marine.
“This here’s Penny … she’s an only child,” the Governor explains as he shoves the dripping severed head within range of the chained cadaver. “We came from a small town called Waynesboro. Penny’s mother—my sweet wife, Sarah—was killed in a car crash before the Turn.”
The child feeds.
Bob watches from the doorway, at once appalled and riveted, as the diminutive zombie slurps and chews the soft matter of the cranial passage as though ferreting out the meat of a lobster.
The Governor watches the feeding. The slurping noises fill the air. “My brother Brian and I—along with a few friends of mine—we set out to find greener pastures with Penny here. Made our way west, crashed in Atlanta for a spell, hooked up with some people, lost some people. Kept moving west.”
The little corpse settles down, leaning against the wall with tiny, greasy, scarlet-stained fingers burrowing deep into the hollowed-out skull for morsels.
The Governor’s voice drops an octave. “Had a run-in with some dirtbags at an orchard not far from here.” His words falter for a moment. No tears but his voice crumbles a little. “Put my brother in charge of Penny while I fended ’em off … and one thing led to another.”
Bob cannot move. He cannot speak in this airless chamber of stained tiles, exposed plumbing, and mold-darkened grout. He watches the tiny abomination, her ghastly face content now, stringers of brain matter hanging from her little tulip lips, her fish-belly eyes rolling back in her head as she leans back.
“My brother f*cked up big-time, got my baby killed,” the Governor explains now, his head down, his chin on his chest. His voice gets thick with emotion. “Brian was weak and that’s all there is to it. I could not let it go, though.” He looks at Bob through raw, wet eyes. “I know you can relate, Bob. I could not let go of my baby girl.”
Bob can relate. His chest seizes up with sorrow for Brenda.
“I blame myself for Penny getting killed and comin’ back.” The Governor stares at the floor. “I kept her going with scraps and we kept headin’ west. By the time we got to Woodbury my brother Brian was ape-shit crazy with guilt.”
The thing that was once a little girl drops the skull as though discarding an oyster shell. She gazes around the room through her milky eyes as if awakening from a dream.
“I had to put Brian down like a sick dog,” the Governor utters, almost to himself. He takes a step closer to the little thing that used to be a child. His voice becomes almost toneless. “I still see my Penny in there sometimes … when she’s calm like this.”
Bob swallows hard. Contrary emotions swirl and eddy inside him—repulsion, sadness, fear, bone-deep longing, even sympathy for this deranged individual—and he hangs his head. “You been through a lot.”
“Look at that, Bob.” The Governor nods toward the little zombie. The child-thing cocks its head, staring at the Governor with a vexed expression. The thing blinks its eyes. A faint trace of Penny Blake glimmers behind its eyes. “My baby’s still in there. Aren’t ya, honey?”
The Governor goes over to the chained creature, kneels and strokes its livid cheek.
Bob stiffens, starts to say, “Be careful, you don’t want to be—”
“Here’s my beautiful baby girl.” The Governor strokes the thing’s matted hair. The tiny zombie blinks. The pallid face changes, eyes narrowing, blackened lips peeling away from rotten baby teeth.
Bob steps forward. “Look out—”
The Penny-thing snaps its jaws at the exposed flesh of the Governor’s wrist, but the Governor pulls away just in time. “Whoopsy!”
The little zombie strains at its chain, scuttling to its feet and reaching at the air … as the Governor backs away. He speaks in baby talk. “Wascally Wabbit … almost got Daddy that time!”
Bob gets woozy. He can feel his gorge rising, the bile threatening to come up.
“Bob, do me a favor and reach into that loose bundle the head came out of.”
“Huh?”
“Do me a favor and grab that last little goodie in that bag over there.”
Bob holds his vomit in and turns and finds the bundle on the floor and looks inside. A pale human finger, apparently male, lies at the bottom of the bag in a clot of drying blood. Hair sprouts from the knuckles, and from the ragged end protrudes a small nodule of white bone.
Something loosens inside Bob—as sudden as a rubber band snapping—as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket, bends down, and retrieves the finger.
“Why don’t you do the honors, my friend,” the Governor suggests, standing proudly over the snapping zombie-child, his hands on his hips.
Bob feels as though his body has begun to move on its own, with a mind of its own. “Yeah … sure.”
“Go ahead.”
Bob stands within inches of the chain’s limit, as the Penny-thing snarls and sputters noisily at him, clanging against the U-bolt. “Yeah … why not?”
Holding the finger out at arm’s length, Bob feeds it to the creature.
The little corpse gobbles the thing, falling to its knees, two-handing the finger into her ravenous little pit of a mouth. The nauseating wet noises fill the laundry room.
The two men stand side by side, watching now. The Governor puts his arm around his new friend.
* * *
By the end of that week the men on the wall have reached the edge of the third block, along Jones Mill Road, where the U.S. Post Office sits boarded and defaced with graffiti. Along the brick wall adjacent to the parking lot some joker with a few years of college lit classes has spray-painted the words THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS NOT WITH A BANG BUT WITH A WALKER, a constant reminder of the end of society and government services as we know them.
On Saturday Josh Lee Hamilton ends up on a work crew, hauling dollies loaded with scrap lumber from one end of the sidewalk to the other, bartering his muscles for food so that he and Lilly can continue to eat. He has run out of valuables to trade, and for the last couple of days Josh has been doing menial tasks such as emptying latrines and cleaning animal carcasses in the smokehouse. But he gladly does the work for Lilly.
Josh has fallen so deeply for the woman that he secretly lets the tears come at night, in the desolate darkness of the walk-up apartment, after Lilly has drifted off in his arms. Josh finds himself beset with the ironies of finding love among the wreckage of this plague. Filled with a kind of reckless hope, as well as the dreamy side effects of the first true intimate relationship of his life, Josh barely notices the absence of the other members of his group.
The little clique seems to have scattered to the winds. Occasionally Josh will get a glimpse of Megan at night, creeping along the balustrades of residential buildings, scantily clad and stoned. Josh has no idea whether she is still with Scott. In fact, Scott has vanished. No one seems to know where he is, and the sad truth is, nobody seems to care. Business seems to be brisk for Megan. Out of the fifty or so residents of Woodbury, less than a dozen are women, and out of those only about four are premenopausal.
Far more troubling is Bob’s apparent ascendancy to town mascot. Evidently the Governor—Josh trusts this sociopath as a leader about as much as he trusts one of the walkers to coach a Little League team—has taken an interest in old Bob, and has been plying the man with good whiskey, barbiturates, and social status.
On Saturday afternoon, however, Josh puts all this out of his mind as he unloads a pallet of siding at the end of the temporary wall. Other workmen move along the flanks of the barricade, nailing planks into place. Some use hammers, others nail guns connected to gas-powered generators. The noise is troublesome if not unmanageable.
“Just stack it over there by the sandbags, cousin,” Martinez says with a neighborly nod, an M1 assault rifle on his hip.
Clad in his trademark do-rag and sleeveless camo shirt, Martinez continues to be the hail-fellow-well-met. Josh cannot quite figure the man out. He seems to be the most even-tempered of the Woodbury bunch, but the bar here is not that high. Charged with supervising the ever-changing shift of guards on the walls, Martinez rarely fraternizes with the Governor, although the two of them seem to be joined at the hip. “Just try and keep the noise down to a minimum, bro,” he adds with a wink, “if at all possible.”
“Gotcha,” Josh says with a nod and starts off-loading the four-by-six sheets of particleboard onto the ground. He sheds his lumberjack coat—the sweat has broken out on his neck and back, the winter sun high in the sky today—and he finishes the stacking in mere minutes.
Martinez comes over. “Why don’t you go ahead and grab one more load before lunch.”
“Roger that,” Josh says, and pulls the empty dolly free of the stack, then turns and heads back down the walk, leaving his jacket—as well as his snub-nosed .38 police special—hanging on a fence post.
Josh sometimes forgets that the gun is tucked into his jacket pocket. He has yet to use the thing since coming to Woodbury; the guards have the place pretty much covered.
Over the last week, in fact, only a few attacks have occurred along the edges of the woods, or on the side roads, which have been easily and promptly quelled by the well-armed band of weekend warriors. According to Martinez, the powers that be in Woodbury have discovered a cache of weapons at a National Guard station within walking distance of the town—an entire arsenal of military-grade weaponry—which the Governor has put to good use.
The truth is, walker attacks are the least of the Governor’s problems. The human population of Woodbury seems to be curdling under the pressure of postplague life. Tempers are stretched thin. People are starting to lash out at each other.
Josh crosses the two-block distance between the construction site and the warehouse in less than five minutes, thinking about Lilly and his future with her. Lost in his thoughts, he does not notice the odor wafting around him as he approaches the wood-frame building on the edge of the railroad tracks.
The warehouse once stood as a storage shed for the southern terminus of the Chattooga and Chickamauga Railway. Throughout the twentieth century tobacco farmers would ship their bundles of raw leaves up north on this line to Fayetteville for processing.
Josh trudges up to the long narrow building and parks the dolly outside the door. The edifice rises up at least thirty-five feet at the highest pitch of its weathered, gabled roof. The siding is ancient, chipped, and scarred with neglect. The single tall window by the door is broken out and boarded. The place looks like a ruined museum, a relic of the old South. Workmen have been using the building to keep the lumber dry and stash building materials.
“Josh!”
Josh pauses at the entrance when he hears the familiar voice drifting on the breeze behind him. He turns just in time to see Lilly scurrying up in her trademark funky attire—floppy hat, multicolored scarves, and a coyote coat she acquired in trade from an older woman in town—a weary smile on her slender face.
“Babygirl, you are a sight for sore eyes,” Josh says, grabbing her and gently pulling her into a bear hug. She hugs him back—not exactly with unbridled abandon, more of a platonic hug—and once again Josh wonders if he has come on too strong with her. Or perhaps their lovemaking has changed some complex dynamic between them. Or maybe he has not lived up to her expectations. She seems to be holding back her affection slightly. Just slightly. But Josh puts it out of his mind. Maybe it’s just the stress.
“Can we talk?” she says, looking up into his eyes with a heavy, somber gaze.
“Sure … you want to give me a hand?”
“After you,” she says, gesturing toward the entrance. Josh turns and pries the door open.
The smell of dead flesh—mingling with the moldy, airless dark inside the storage shed—does not register at first. Nor do they notice the gap between two petrified sections of drywall in the rear of the shed, or the fact that the backside of the building is perilously exposed to a wild section of forest. The building stretches at least a hundred feet back in the darkness, draped in cobwebs and cast-off rail sections so rusted and corroded they are the color of the earth.
“What’s on your mind, babydoll?” Josh crosses the cinder floor to a pile of wooden siding. The four-by-six panels look as though they came from a barn, their grooves of deep red paint chipped and scabrous with mud.
“We gotta move on, Josh, we gotta get outta this town … before something terrible happens.”
“Soon, Lilly.”
“No, Josh. Seriously. Listen to me.” She tugs his arm and pulls him around so they are face-to-face. “I don’t care if Megan and Scott and Bob stay … we gotta ditch this place. It looks all cozy and Mayberry RFD on the surface but it’s rotting underneath.”
“I know … I just have to—”
He stops when a shadow blurs outside the slats of the boarded window in his peripheral vision.
“Oh, my God, Josh, did you—”
“Get behind me,” he says, realizing several things all at once. He smells the odor permeating the musk of the moldy shed, he hears the low guttural vibrations of growls coming from the rear of the building, and he sees a slice of daylight blooming through a gap in the corner.
Worst of all, Josh realizes he left his pistol in his jacket.