Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short

Lilly sits with her legs crossed Indian-style, on the ground under the massive branches of a live oak, which dapple the carpet of matted leaves around her with a skein of shadows. She reclines against the gigantic tree trunk as she speaks. Her eyes remain fixed on the swaying treetops in the middle distance.

She has a faraway look that Josh Lee Hamilton has seen now and again on the faces of war veterans and emergency room nurses—the gaze of perpetual exhaustion, the haggard look of the shell-shocked, the thousand-yard stare. Josh feels the urge to take her delicate, slender body into his arms and hold her and stroke her hair and make everything all better. But he senses somehow—he knows—now is not the time. Now is the time to listen.

“Do what?” he asks her. Josh sits across from her, also cross-legged, wiping the back of his neck with a damp bandanna. A box of cigars sits on the ground in front of him—the last of his dwindling supply. He is almost hesitant to go through the last of them—a superstitious twinge that he’ll be sealing his fate.

Lilly looks up at him. “When the walkers attack…how do you deal with it without being…scared shitless?”

Josh lets out a weary chuckle. “If you figure that out, you’re gonna have to teach me.”

She stares at him for a moment. “Come on.”

“What?”

“You’re telling me you’re scared shitless when they attack?”

“Damn straight.”

“Oh, please.” She tilts her head incredulously. “You?”

“Let me tell you something, Lilly.” Josh picks up the package of cigars, shakes one loose, and sparks it with his Zippo. He takes a thoughtful puff. “Only the stupid or the crazy ain’t scared these days. You ain’t scared, you ain’t paying attention.”

She looks out beyond the rows of tents lined along the split-rail fence. She lets out a pained sigh. Her narrow face is drawn, ashen. She looks as though she’s trying to articulate thoughts that just stubbornly refuse to cooperate with her vocabulary. At last she says, “I’ve been dealing with this for a while. I’m not…proud of it. I think it’s messed up a lot of things for me.”

Josh looks at her. “What has?”

“The wimp factor.”

“Lilly—”

“No. Listen. I need to say this.” She refuses to look at him, her eyes burning with shame. “Before this…outbreak happened…it was just sort of…inconvenient. I missed out on a few things. I screwed some things up because I’m a chickenshit…but now the stakes are…I don’t know. I could get somebody killed.” She finally manages to look up into the big man’s eyes. “I could totally ruin things for somebody I care about.”


Josh knows what she’s talking about, and it puts the squeeze on his heart. From the moment he laid eyes on Lilly Caul he had felt feelings that he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager back in Greenville—that kind of rapturous fascination a boy can fix upon the curve of a girl’s neck, the smell of her hair, the spray of freckles along the bridge of her nose. Yes, indeed, Josh Lee Hamilton is smitten. But he is not going to screw this relationship up, as he had screwed up so many before Lilly, before the plague, before the world had gotten so goddamn bleak.

Back in Greenville, Josh developed crushes on girls with embarrassing frequency, but he always seemed to muck things up by rushing it. He would behave like a big old puppy licking at their heels. Not this time. This time, Josh was going to play it smart…smart and cautious and one step at a time. He may be a big old dumb-ass hick from South Carolina but he’s not stupid. He’s willing to learn from his past mistakes.