She climbs the slope and approaches the grave. The banging noises reveal themselves to be muffled knocking sounds—a fist pounding against a door, or perhaps the inside of a coffin—the noise dampened by layers of earth. Lilly can’t breathe. She kneels by the headstone. The knocking sounds are coming from inside Josh’s grave. They are so loud now that the loose earth across the surface of his grave trembles and skitters across the mound in tiny avalanches.
Lilly’s terror mutates. She touches the shivering mound of earth. Her heart goes cold. Josh is down there, knocking on the inside of his coffin, a horrible entreaty to be freed from death, to be loosened from this prison.
The walkers are coming for Lilly, she can feel their foul breath on the back of her neck, their long shadows sliding up the hill on either side of her. She is doomed. Josh wants out. The knocking rises. Lilly looks down at the grave, her tears tracking down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. Her tears flood the earth. The rough-hewn planks of Josh’s simple coffin become visible in the mud, something moving inside the slats.
Lilly weeps. The walkers surround her. The knocking rises to a thunderous beat. Lilly sobs, and she reaches down and tenderly touches the coffin, when all at once—
—Josh bursts out of the wooden enclosure, tearing through it as though it were made of matchsticks, his hungry mouth chewing the air, an inhuman groan coming out of him. Lilly screams but no sound comes out of her. Josh’s big square face churns with bloodlust as he goes for her neck, his eyes as dead and shiny as Buffalo nickels.
The impact of his rotting teeth hitting her jugular wakes her up in a spasm of horror.
*
Lilly jerks awake, soaked in feverish sweat, the morning light vibrating with the sound of someone knocking on her apartment door. She gasps for breath. She blinks away the nightmare, the sound of her own scream still ringing in her ears. The knocking continues.
“Lilly? You okay?”
The familiar voice, muffled outside the front door, barely registers in her ears. She rubs her face, taking deep breaths and trying to get her bearings.
At length, the room comes into focus, and her breathing returns to normal. She drags herself out of bed, the dizziness washing over her as she searches for her jeans and her top. The knocking gets frantic.
“Coming!” she blurts in a strangled voice as she pulls on her clothes.
She goes to the door. “Oh … hey,” she mumbles after opening the door and seeing Martinez standing on her porch in the pale light.
The tall, rangy Latino wears a bandanna pirate-style around his head, and he has muscular arms, which poke through the cutoff sleeves of his work shirt. He has an assault rifle slung over his broad shoulder, and his handsome face furrows with concern. “What the hell’s going on in there?” he says, giving her the once-over, his dark eyes shining with worry.
“I’m fine,” she says, a tad unconvincingly.
“Did you forget?”
“Um … no.”
“Get your guns, Lilly,” he says. “We’re going on that run I told you about, and we need all hands on deck.”
THREE
“Morning, boss!”
A squat, middle-aged, bald man named Gus greets Martinez and Lilly out by the farthest semitruck, which blocks the exit gate on the north side of town. With his rhino-thick neck and oil-stained sleeveless T-shirt stretched taut by a rotund belly, Gus gives off the impression of a blunt instrument. But what he lacks in intelligence, he makes up for in loyalty.
“Morning, Gus,” Martinez says as he walks up. “You mind grabbing a couple of them empty gas containers, in case we hit pay dirt on the trip?”
“Right away, boss.”
Gus whirls and trundles off with his pistol-grip 12-gauge under his arm like a newspaper he hasn’t gotten around to reading. Martinez and Lilly watch the little troll vanish around a corner.
Lilly glances to the east and sees the early morning sun peering over the crest of the barricade. It’s not even seven yet and already the unseasonable chill of the previous week has burned off. In this part of Georgia, spring can be a tad bipolar—coming in cool and wet, but turning as warm and humid as the tropics without warning.
“Lilly, why don’t you ride in back with the others.” Martinez nods toward a big military cargo truck in the middle distance. “I’ll put ol’ Gus up in the shotgun seat with me, in case we have to pick off anything on the way.”
Idling under a canopy of swaying live oaks, the heavy-duty truck sits perpendicular to the semitruck. It features enormous mud-speckled tires and a mine-resistant, riveted hull as durable as a tank—a recent acquisition from the neighboring National Guard station. The rear hatch is draped in a tarp.
As Martinez and Lilly approach, an older man in a baseball cap and silk roadie jacket comes around the front of the truck, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. A weather-beaten, rail-thin sixty-something with cunning eyes and an iron-gray goatee, David Stern has the vaguely regal, hard-ass bearing of a college football coach. “She was down a quart,” he says to Martinez. “I put some recycled oil in her … ought to keep her going a while. Morning, Lilly.”
Lilly gives the man a groggy nod and mumbles a drowsy greeting.
Gus returns with a pair of battered plastic gas containers.
“Throw them in back, Gus.” Martinez circles around the rear of the truck. Lilly and David follow. “Where’s the little lady, David?”
“In here!” The tarp flaps open, and Barbara Stern sticks her graying head out. Also in her mid-sixties, she wears a denim jacket over a faded cotton muumuu, and has the wild, silver tendrils of an aging earth mother. Her deeply lined, sun-browned face is animated with the rapier wit that has presumably kept her husband on his toes all these years. “Trying to teach Junior here something. It’s like pulling teeth.”
The “Junior” to which she refers suddenly peeks out of the cargo hold next to her.