“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 by 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?”