All at once everything slows down, and the ringing in Lilly’s ears drowns out every other sound, and the pain bolts up her spine and seizes her arms and legs. She tries to scoot away from the onslaught, but now an enormous male moves in on her. A former farmhand in blood-soaked work pants, its shirt torn in half, revealing sagging pectorals the color of earthworms, it pounces on her legs.
Lilly wriggles under its dead weight, trying to get to her knife, but the thing has her pinned to the floor, and the creature’s mottled face is folding open like a clamshell, exposing rows of greasy, moldering incisors, which gnash and clack noisily as they close in on her throat. Lilly manages to get her hands around its head.
For a moment she prevents it from devouring her, holding it at arm’s length.
Over the course of that terrible instant, holding that snapping turtle of a head, engulfed in the odor of its hellish spoor—a mixture of rotting meat and that inimitable lower note of oily, black death-stench—Lilly looks into the thing’s eyes. Just for a split second, she registers something glinting behind the dead sharklike cataracts. Cruelty? Madness? Rage? Agony? Maybe all of these things shimmer for a moment behind the creature’s gaze as it regards its human food. But then, something breaks the spell.
Lilly feels a breathy puff of noxious wind on the side of her face, clammy and fetid, and she realizes she’s lying right next to the chain-link barrier stretched across the tributary tunnel.
The thing on top of her snarls and drools as it looms closer and closer to her neck. Her strength dwindling, Lilly takes one last, heartbreaking glance at the narrow tunnel behind that chain-like barrier. She can see the passageway stretching back into the dark void, a single pool of yellow light from a solitary cage lamp hanging down, and she realizes it might as well be a million miles away. She realizes she has no more options. She has no more tricks up her sleeve. She feels her strength draining away.
For the first time in her life, she realizes it’s time to give up.
More creatures close in. At least a dozen of them—mostly males, a few ravenous shells of older women, one gruesome child with half of its face torn open and leaking gristle and teeth—come at her from all sides. She feels the shuddering, drooling, wriggling head in her hands begin to slip out of her grip.
Einstein said time is relative, and anyone who has been unlucky enough to be engulfed by these hellish creatures knows the tenuous connection between the passage of time and the human mind under great stress. People in car wrecks see every detail in the split second before impact. Soldiers on the battlefield have reported witnessing the very bullets that put them in wheelchairs hanging in the air like moths before striking them. Lilly experiences something similar in the suspended beat of time before the first set of teeth sink into the soft flesh of her neck.
She closes her eyes, and she half expects her entire life to flicker across her mind-screen in some extravagant Cecil B. DeMille montage of her childhood, maybe a series of gauzy images beginning with her nursery in that airless little knotty-pine room in the rear of the Alton Street house. From there, we go to her first grade class picture in Hastings Park down by the river, her boyfriends, her milestone moments, and maybe even her high school graduation with her father, Everett, proudly carrying around her mortarboard hat and her little mimeographed diploma as though they were the Nobel Prize.
Part of her longs for this kind of storybook closure, but of course none of it appears to her, and now she sees only the minuscule red cinders down in the center of a monster’s eyes burning into her retinas, floating across the dark field of her vision, as the air fills with the infernal noise of garbled snarling and she feels the cold breath of her assailant as its head finally slips through her sweaty fingers. She holds her breath, waiting for the teeth to plunge into her, when suddenly she hears a loud bang.
Her eyes pop open at precisely the same moment that the head above her explodes.
* * *
To the trained ear, the blast of a .357 magnum, especially in the confines of a narrow subterranean tunnel, makes an unmistakable roar. Deeper and more thunderous than the sound produced by smaller handguns, loud enough to puncture eardrums, the sonic boom rings out as if a giant wrecking ball had slammed through the biter on top of Lilly. In accompaniment with the echo of the gunshot, fluids and brain matter erupt in all directions. Lilly flinches as a wet spattering of blood splashes into her face, while the rest of the skull and rancid brain matter are blown sideways across the tunnel, hitting the opposite wall with a splat.
The body stiffens for a moment before collapsing on top of Lilly, the lifeless weight pressing down on her so hard it knocks the wind from her lungs. She frantically looks around, trying to grasp the import of what just happened, but the blood of the headless lump is now flowing out all over her, and she can’t breathe, and she sees something out of the corner of her eye.
A series of three more flashes—like sparks of magnesium flaring in the dark, touched off by a firing pin—flicker in the shadows of the tributary.
Three more biters go down around Lilly while she tries to wriggle out from under the weight of the massive corpse pressing upon her—three more heads blown apart by large-caliber bullets, spraying brain mist against the opposite wall and sending body after body deflating onto the floor. In some far-flung compartment in Lilly’s traumatized brain, she registers the fact that only hollow-point bullets could do this kind of damage, the projectiles expanding on impact, sending battering rams through mortified brains.
And in a deeper compartment, Lilly realizes there’s only one person around here that she knows of who uses these soft-point dumdums.
Suddenly, she sees two things in her peripheral vision that get her up and moving: the shadow of a human being to her left, behind the chain-link barrier, crawling toward her, and her pistol, the .22 caliber Ruger, with its fresh magazine of ten rounds, lying ten feet away on the tunnel floor. She moves quickly, before the next wave of biters can swarm her, and lunges across the tunnel. She grabs the pistol and jacks the slide and spins and squeezes off four quick blasts into the heads of approaching biters.
Pink mist flashes in the darkness—more tissue spraying the adjacent wall—and three of the closest walkers collapse in flaccid heaps on the floor.
By this point, the single shadowy figure in the tributary has managed to crawl the remaining fifteen feet or so to the Cyclone fence barrier, and now this unidentified man begins to fumble with the cable ties on its outside edges that secure the screen to the tunnel opening. The man seems to be injured or otherwise incapacitated, his hands clumsy on the knotted cables.
“Bob?”
Lilly lunges toward the barrier as it shivers and quakes in Bob Stookey’s oily hands. The cable finally breaks loose, and the chain-link section collapses outward onto Bob.
“BOB!”
The impact knocks the him backward. He trips and falls onto his spine, the rusty chain link pressing down on him. He lies there in a supine position, trying to breathe, trying to speak, his eyes bugging in agony. His flesh is pasty white, his eyes rimmed in livid purple, his lips gray and bloodless. His lungs heave, expanding and contracting under his filthy, blood-soaked chambray shirt with the urgency of a bellows fanning a dying fire.
Lilly slips through the opening and pulls the barrier off the older man.
A swarm of about twelve new walkers converges on the gaping maw behind Lilly as she frantically lifts the barrier up and hurriedly slams it back in place, securing it with the cables. A few of the creatures try to force their way out, pushing on the chain link before the barrier is secured. Grunting and groaning with effort, Lilly lets out a howl of rage as she struggles with the cables, her hands greasy with sweat, the creatures pushing up against her, their dead fingers trying to worm their way through the open links. She finally gets the cables wound tight.
The pressure of the swarm strains the fencing, bowing the chain link inward, but the cables hold.
Lilly flops down beside Bob. She pulls him into a furious embrace, smelling his trademark scent: Marlboros, sweat, Juicy Fruit, and Old Spice. She cradles his head to her collarbone and strokes his hair and softly murmurs, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.… We cut that one real close … too close.… I thought you were a goner, you old geezer.… God, it’s good to see … Thank you, thank—”
He hasn’t said a word. She can feel his chest palpating. His skin is cold and clammy. His shirt is soaked through with sweat.
Lilly backs off an inch or two and takes a closer look at Bob’s face, which is draped in shadows from the meager cone of light above them—and that’s when she starts panicking. She can see by the color of his skin, the way his eyes have gone pink and glassy, the way his nostrils flare and his lungs heave as he tries to speak but is able to make only strangled grunting noises, that he’s having some kind of seizure or attack.
The word “heart” bubbles up from the deeper pools of Lilly’s unconscious.
* * *
She saw her uncle Mike have one years ago, before her very eyes at the kitchen table at Grandpa Buck’s place in Valdosta. The heavyset house painter was Everett’s older brother, and had spent a lifetime of catting around and drinking heavily and sampling every form of fatty food and fast women that life had to offer. Divorced three times, a parolee from the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta for wire fraud, Uncle Mike surprised no one when he bowed his head that night at the dining table like he was either praying or about to take a header into his collard greens.
The strangest part—especially to a seventeen-year-old girl—was the casual way he looked up and said, ‘Oops … here comes.’ Like he was expecting a package or a court summons. And everybody around the table knew what he was talking about, and everybody knew what it entailed. Nobody panicked, nobody rushed to the telephone. In fact, they immediately got into an argument regarding what vehicle they should deploy to take him to the hospital.
Lilly remembers waiting for the man to clutch his chest dramatically and flop onto his back in seizures of agony like in the movies, but that never happened. Uncle Mike might as well have had a gas bubble that night that he needed to simply belch out—in fact, Lilly had learned later that this was exactly what a heart attack felt like … at first. That night, before they took Mike Caul away, Lilly saw her dad’s brother writhing in pain on the couch out in the living room, complaining that it felt like an iron vise was tightening around his chest. Lilly remembers his skin color going so pallid and gray it looked as though the man was made of marble.
Bob Stookey has this same coloration right this moment in the dim light of the tunnel, as though he’s been in agony for quite a long while now, his face so drawn and lifeless it looks like someone has sucked the air out of it. The fleshy bags under his eyes are so wrinkled they remind Lilly of the skin of a balloon that has been deflated. Lilly’s heart begins to race. She rises to a kneeling position, cradles his head, and says, “Bob, can you hear me? Can you understand?”
He manages a nod, and then a sort of crooked grin. Very softly, very breathlessly, he says, “Don’t have to … yell.… I’m old … but I ain’t deaf.”
Lilly recognizes in his halting, wheezing words the sound of an oxygen-starved, late-stage heart attack. A tremendous stab of emotion slices through her as she realizes he probably crawled all this way from the Elkins Creek junction in unimaginable pain. She takes him by the shoulders, gently lifting him so they are eye to eye. “Bob, is it a heart attack, ya think?”
He manages a nod.
“Can you breathe?”
With great effort: “Not … great … no.”
“What do I do? Tell me what to do. You’re the fucking medic.”
He swallows with difficulty and looks like he’s about to fall asleep. He manages a shake of his head, probably indicating there isn’t shit she can do. His eyelids flutter for a moment.
“Stay with me!” She shakes him. “Breathe!” She straddles him. “I’m going to try CPR!” She barely remembers it from her lifeguard days, but what the hell else is she going to do? “Here we go!” She crosses her hands on his upper sternum and gives him three sharp nudges. She has no idea what she’s doing. “Breathe, Bob! Breathe!” She bends down and pinches his nose and breathes into his mouth, three sharp breaths. “Breathe!—Breathe!—BREATHE!”
Bob’s eyes have rolled back in his head, and his body has gone limp.
“No!—No!—Goddamnit no!!—No fucking way!!” She clenches her fists and pounds his chest as hard as she can. “You fucking asshole!—You don’t do this to me now!” She hunches down and blows into his mouth as though trying to inflate the balloon back to where it was. “Bob!—Stay with me!—Please!—Bob, please!!”
Behind her, the swarm reacts to the commotion, the chain link rattling as they press inward, harder and harder, the watery growls rising into a hellish dissonant commentary. Lilly looks over her shoulder at them. “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!”
She feels something tugging at her sweatshirt and looks down and sees Bob’s huge, coarse hand clutching the fabric of her shirttail as though holding on for dear life. He looks as though he’s trying to say something. His liver-colored lips tremble, his mouth working desperately to get words out.
Lilly climbs off him, kneels next to him, leans down, and tries to hear.
Bob’s voice is drowned out by the clamor of the swarm, the husky baritone growls bouncing off the walls and the inside of Lilly’s skull.
She turns and shrieks at the biters at the top of her lungs. “YOU FUCKING SACKS OF SHIT!!—SHUT YOUR FUCKING ROTTEN MOUTHS!!!”
Bob tries desperately to speak. He clutches her shirt with the last soupçon of energy left in him. She kneels down and pushes her ear to his lips. She concentrates on the breathy whisper coming out of him. The word “love” and the word “you” are the only things she can make out at first. Then she hears the words “Lilly-girl” very clearly, and she registers the complete sentence: “Love you, Lilly-girl.”
“Bob?”
His grip on her shirt has loosened. His hand falls to the tunnel floor. His body relaxes and goes still. She shakes him gently.
“BOB!”
His face has changed. The furrows of wrinkles corrugating his brow have smoothed out, and so have the crow’s-feet around his hound-dog eyes. The pain has left his face. An expression that Lilly can only think of as tranquil has passed over his features.
“Oh Jesus…”
She embraces the lifeless shell in her arms. She hugs him tighter than she has ever hugged another human being, and she keeps hugging him for a long time in that gloomy tunnel with the atonal chorus of snarls echoing off the walls, reverberating down the arteries of the labyrinth.
Lilly tenderly lays the body back down on the tunnel floor, and she closes its eyes. She leans down and plants a soft kiss on the forehead. Her tears fall onto the chest, soaking into the tattered denim shirt. She wipes her eyes. She feels something cutting into her leg, something sharp, and looks down.
Bob’s left hand—frozen in death—clutches a bundle of dynamite.
Lilly stares at the ten-inch paper sticks wound with duct tape.
She stares at them for a long time, thinking, listening to the horrible grinding noise of the dead.