Austin gets to the arena early that night—around eight forty-five—and sits alone, down front, behind the rusted cyclone-fence barrier, on the end of the second row, thinking about Lilly. He wonders if he should have pushed harder to get her to come along with him tonight. He thinks about that look she gave him earlier that evening—the softness that crossed her hazel eyes right before she kissed him—and he feels a strange mixture of excitement and panic burning in his gut.
The great xenon arc lamps boom to life around the stadium, illuminating the dirt strip and littered infield, and the stands slowly fill up around Austin with noisy townspeople hungry for blood and catharsis. The air has the snap of a chill in it and reeks of fuel oil and walker rot, and Austin feels weirdly removed from it all.
Clad in a hoodie, jeans, and motorcycle boots, his long hair pulled back in a leather stay, he fidgets on the cold hard seat, his muscles sore from the afternoon’s adventures in the hinterlands. He can’t get comfortable. He gazes out across the infield at the far side of the arena and sees the dark portals filling with clusters of upright corpses, each leashed to a handler by thick chains. The handlers start leading the biters out into the jarring light of the infield, the silver follow-spots making the dead faces look almost Kabuki-like, painted, like morbid clowns.
The crowd simmers with noise and catcalls and clapping. The phlegmy growling and moaning of the walkers as they take their places on the gravel warning track blends with the rising voices of the spectators to create an unearthly din. Austin stares at the spectacle. He can’t get Lilly out of his head. The roar that’s building all around him begins to fade … and fade … and fade away … until all he can hear in his head is Lilly’s voice softly making a promise.
I’ll show you some things … the only way we’re going to survive … helping each other.
Something pokes Austin in the ribs, and yanks him back to reality.
He jerks around and realizes an old man has taken a seat right next to him.
Sporting a nicotine-yellowed beard, an ancient face as wrinkled as wadded parchment, and a tattered black overcoat and wide-brimmed hat, he’s a feisty old Hasidic Jew who somehow managed to survive the streets of Atlanta after the Turn. His name is Saul, and he shows Austin his stained, rotting teeth as he says with a smile, “Gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight … am I right?”
“Yeah, absolutely.” Austin feels dizzy, light-headed. “Can’t wait.”
Austin turns back to the gathering of dead on the track’s periphery, and the sight of it makes him feel sick to his stomach. One of the biters, an obese male in bile-spattered painter’s overalls, sprouts a knot of small intestines from a sucking wound in his porcine belly. Another one is missing the side of her face, her upper teeth gleaming in the spotlights as she moans and tugs on her chain. Austin is quickly losing his enthusiasm for the fights. Lilly has a point. He looks down at the sticky tread beneath the bench, the cigarette butts and puddles of soft drinks and stale beer. He closes his eyes and thinks of Lilly’s sweet face, the spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose, the slender curve of her neck.
“Excuse me,” he says, standing up and pushing himself past the old man.
“Better hurry back,” the geezer mumbles, blinking fitfully. “Show’s gonna start lickety-split!”
Austin is already halfway down the aisle. He doesn’t look back.
*
On his way across town, moving past the shadows of storefronts and the dark, boarded buildings of the main drag, Austin sees a half-dozen people coming toward him on the opposite side of the street.
Pulling his hoodie tighter, thrusting his hands in his pockets, he keeps moving, his head down. Avoiding eye contact with the oncoming group, he recognizes the Governor, who walks out in front of three strangers like a tour guide, his chest all puffed up with pride. Bruce and Gabe bring up the rear with assault rifles cradled and ready.
“—Guard station about a mile away—completely abandoned,” the Governor is saying to the strangers. Austin has never seen these people before. The Governor is treating them like VIPs. “All kinda supplies left inside,” the Governor is saying. “Been making good use of it. Night-vision goggles, sniper rifles, ammo, you seen it in action. This place wouldn’t be shit without it.”
As Austin passes on the opposite sidewalk, he gets a better glimpse of the newcomers.
The two men and one woman look battle-scarred, somber, and maybe even a little nervous. Of the two men—each of whom is clad in riot gear—the older one looks tougher, meaner, more cunning. Sandy-haired, with a grizzle of a beard, the older man walks alongside the Governor, and Austin hears him say, “You sound lucky. Where is it you’re taking us? We’re walking toward the light. What is that? A baseball game?”
Before they vanish around the corner, Austin glances over his shoulder and gets a better look at the other two strangers. The younger man wears a riot helmet and looks maybe Asian, his age hard to tell at this distance and in this light.
The woman is far more interesting to look at. Her lean, sculpted face barely visible within the shadow of her hooded garment, she looks to Austin to be in her mid-thirties, African American, and exotically beautiful.
Just for an instant, Austin has a bad feeling about these people.
“Well, stranger,” he hears the Governor saying, as they pass out of view, “it looks like we’re not the only ones lucky around here. You showed up on the perfect night. There’s a fight tonight.…”