Lilly waves him off, turns, and walks away in the rain, mumbling, “Whatever.”
Martinez watches her vanish in the mist. “He knows what he’s doing,” he says again, softly, under his breath, as though trying to convince himself.
ELEVEN
The rains continue, an unremitting deluge over south central Georgia for nearly three straight days. It’s not until midweek that the weather moves on, leaving flash floods and downed power lines in its wake all the way to the Eastern seaboard. The land around Woodbury is left drenched and bound up in mud holes and washouts, the fallow fields to the south so sodden and inundated that the men on the wall notice clusters of walkers driven out of the woods, wallowing in the flooded areas like giant glistening leeches climbing on top of each other. It’s like shooting fish in a fishbowl for the .50 caliber gunners on the northeast and southeast corners of the barricade. But other than these noisy, gruesome little displays of what the Governor has started calling “waste management,” the town of Woodbury remains almost eerily calm that week. In fact, it’s not until the end of that week that Lilly notices something amiss.
Up until then, she keeps a low profile, spending most of her days inside, honoring Martinez’s directive to keep any news of hostile strangers in their midst to herself. She passes the time reading, watching the rain, thinking, and lying awake at night agonizing over what to do about Austin. On Thursday, he shows up at her door with a bottle of wine that he nicked from the old storage room at the courthouse, along with a bouquet of Russian sage he picked down by the post office, and she is so touched by the gesture that she lets him in but insists that he avoid the subject of their relationship or any mention of that night they went over the line. He seems happy to just spend time with her. They polish off the entire bottle of wine playing Pictionary—at one point, Austin makes her laugh so hard she does a spit-take when he reveals that his drawing, which appears to be a fried egg, is his brain on drugs—and he doesn’t leave until the gray light of dawn is playing at the seams of the boarded windows. The next day, Lilly has to admit to herself that she likes this guy—regardless of the awkward circumstances—and maybe, just maybe, she would be open to the possibilities.
Then Sunday morning comes. Exactly one week after the fateful night, Lilly awakens with a start sometime before dawn. Something amorphous and unformed in the back of her mind has been bothering her, and for some reason—be it something she dreamed, or something that percolated down through her subconscious over the course of that week—it strikes her full force right then, that morning, like a ball peen hammer right between the eyes.
She jumps out of bed and hurries across the room, tearing open a three-ring binder lying on a makeshift desk of two cinder blocks and a plywood panel. Frantically she rifles through the pages.
“Oh no … no, no, no,” she utters under her breath as she searches through her calendar. For almost a year, she has been religiously keeping track of the date. For many different reasons. She wants to know when the holidays fall, she wants to know when the seasons turn, and most of all, she simply wants to keep in touch with the old order, with civilized life, with normalcy. She wants to stay connected with the passage of time—although there are many in this dark era who have given up, who don’t know their Arbor Day from their Yom Kippur.
She looks at the date and slams the calendar shut with a gasp.
“Oh shit … fuck … shit,” she mutters to herself, backing away from the desk and whirling around as though the floor is about to drop away from under her feet. She paces a nervous circle in the dark bedroom for a moment, her thoughts swimming and crashing into each other. It can’t be the twenty-third. It can’t be. She’s imagining this whole thing. She’s just paranoid. But how can she be sure? How can anybody be sure of anything in this fucked-up Plague World? There must be something she can do to set her mind at ease—to prove to herself she’s just being paranoid. All at once, she freezes and gets an idea.
“Okay!”
She snaps her fingers, and then rushes over to the old battered metal armoire in the corner where she keeps her coats and guns and ammo. She grabs her denim waistcoat, her twin Ruger .22s, the silencers, and a pair of twenty-five-round banana clips. She puts on her coat and then screws on the silencer attachments and shoves the guns behind her belt. She stows the clips in her pockets, takes a deep breath, raises her collar, and heads out the door.
Her breath shows in the predawn air as she emerges from her building. The town is still asleep, and the sun is just peeking out from behind the east woods—sending angelic rays of light across lowlying motes of fog—as Lilly crosses the street and pads quickly down the narrow sidewalk toward the old, derelict post office.
Just beyond the post office—on the other side of the south wall, outside the safe zone—stands a ransacked drugstore. Lilly needs to get into that store, just for a second, in order to find out if she’s crazy or not. There’s only one problem.
It’s outside the wall, and with the passing of the rainstorm, walker activity has picked up out there.
*
In the dimly lit subbasement beneath the racetrack arena, Bruce hears the telltale banging on the inside of the last garage door on the left.