“She was all over me. And all of a sudden, she goes, ‘David, where’s your wallet?’ And I feel the back of my jeans, and sure enough, the thing’s gone.”
Barbara shakes her head, reliving the moment for the millionth time. “My fanny pack was empty, too. Somebody had ripped us off somewhere along the line. Passports, ID, everything. We were stuck in the middle of Argentina and we were stupid Americans, and we had no effen clue what to do with ourselves.”
David smiles to himself, holding the moment in his memory like a precious heirloom he keeps in a drawer. Lilly gets the feeling that this is something essential for the Sterns, something unspoken but as powerful as the motion of the tides or the gravitational tug of the moon. “We get back to the closest village and make a few calls,” David continues, “but there’s no embassy for miles and the cops are about as helpful as a poke in the eye.”
“We’re told we have to wait for our ID issues to be sorted out in Buenos Aires.”
“Which is like eight hundred miles away.”
“Kilometers, Barbara. Eight hundred kilometers away.”
“David, don’t start.”
“Anyway, we have a few centavos left in our pockets—the equivalent of what, Barbara? A buck fifty? So we find a little village and talk a local guy into letting us sleep on the floor of his barn for fifty centavos.”
Barbara smiles wistfully. “It wasn’t exactly the Ritz but we made do.”
David grins at her. “Turned out the man ran a little restaurant in town, and he agreed to let us work there while we waited for our passports to be ironed out. Babs waited tables while I worked in back, slinging chorizo and making menudo for the locals.”
“Funny thing was, it turned out to be one of the best times of our lives.” Barbara lets out a pensive sigh. “We were in such a different environment, and all we had to rely on was each other, but that was … it was … nice.” She looks at her husband and for the first time, her wrinkled, matronly face softens. A look comes over her—just for an instant—that obliterates time, erases all the years, and turns her back into a young bride in love with a good man. “In fact,” she says softly, “it was even kinda sorta terrific.”
David looks at his wife. “We were stuck there for—what? How long was it, Babs?”
“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.