So, super-secret government agent-turned homeless dog-whisperer, makes his move while Kev is b.a.l.l.s deep in Sh.e.l.ley, and manages to take 'em both and get away. James nodded to himself, silently talking the fear out of his head. Bringing Captain Harden back down to size. Because knocking over two people while they were f.u.c.king wasn't that impressive. This guy who Shumate thought was dangerous...he wasn't that impressive.

He was skinny.

He was sick.

He seemed half-crazy.

And James could deal with crazy.

Donald Weathers had been crazy. He'd been an alcoholic and a b.u.m, with a few screws loose. He lived in the woods behind the corner store about a quarter mile from James' old high school. Begged everyone coming and going for spare change and slammed King Cobras all day. The later it got, the more aggressive he got. By evening, he would paw at people's arms. Cuss them out if they didn't give him anything.

It was the closest convenience store to the high school, and naturally, if you skipped cla.s.s, or if you had a car and an empty period, it was the place to be. Unless Donald Weathers was hanging around, begging. He smelled bad, he looked horrible, and most of the girls were scared of him. And it's not fun to skip cla.s.s without a girl.

One day around two o'clock, Donald Weathers was out begging at the same time that James drove Carry Umpstead into the parking lot in his recently acquired 1998 Ford Mustang. Carry Umpstead with the mediocre face, and the big t.i.ts. Because when you're sixteen, your eyes don't travel much farther than that. And all James wanted to do was go inside and show off by using his fake ID to get them some Marlboro's, and if he felt really lucky, maybe even go for some Bud Lights.

But Donald Weathers had been hitting it hard that day. Maybe he'd received more contributions than normal and had taken a few extra forty-ouncers. He stumbled up to James' new Mustang and he completely ignored James and went straight to Carry Umpstead's open window. He leaned in, filling the car with his stink and began pawing. Not just pawing, but grabbing.

Carry swatted his hands away and rolled up the window. No harm no foul, James thought. And Donald stumbled away, cursing loudly at Carry and calling her every name under the sun. And James hoped to G.o.d he would just go away, because if James were being honest, it wasn't just the girls that were afraid of Donald Weathers. It was James too.

But Carry just sat in the car, looking at James like he was the biggest piece of s.h.i.t for just sitting there. Like he didn't have a hair on his b.a.l.l.s. Like she was suddenly embarra.s.sed to be seen in his Ford Mustang. But James just stepped out of the Mustang and went inside anyway, his heart beat slamming, not wanting to even look Donald Weathers in the eye, and feeling ashamed that he hadn't done anything.

Carry wasn't too interested in James after that. Stories were embellished. Rumors were spread. People around high school started looking at James differently. Because he hadn't stuck up for the girl. Because actually, as the story was later retold, Donald Weathers had been grabbing James' b.a.l.l.s, and James was too scared to do anything-another version of the story was that he was gay, and enjoyed it-and that Carry had to step in and defend James.

Naturally, the stories didn't sit well with James.

Even the true ones.

So one night in early fall, James got his courage up with a six pack and two friends, and they drove out to the dead end of Polk Mill Road, where it led into the woods where Donald Weathers lived. They found him living in a little shack, but he was already pa.s.sed out, surrounded by a mountain of empty King Cobra bottles. The fact that James' tormentor was asleep would not be acceptable, because this was all being videoed on one of their phones, so that James could prove he wasn't the coward everyone thought he was. So they woke old Donald up and he came out swinging. Whether he was aggressive because he was crazy, or because he knew even in his drunken state that being surrounded by three teenagers in the middle of the night was a recipe for disaster, James would never know. But he easily dodged the man's drunken blows and he pushed the old f.u.c.ker down onto the ground and commenced to beating the f.u.c.k out of him.

They left him there in the woods, bleeding and unconscious, and James knew it was a strong possibility that Donald Weathers later died on that forest floor, because no one saw him again after that. But James didn't care. Because he had his proof. And his manhood had been reestablished.

So whenever James thought of Captain Harden, smelly and filthy, his ragged beard clumped with dirt, he just pictured Donald Weathers, and he remembered that crazy isn't scary at all. Crazy is just crazy. And he wasn't afraid of crazy.

Shumate leaned out from his position of cover on the other side of the window overlooking the street below. He peered through the dirty gla.s.s, then nodded, barely visible in the waning light. "It's just about time, gents."

Aaron sidled out of the shadows. "How you wanna do it, Boss?"

Shumate leaned on his rifle, b.u.t.tstock like a kickstand. "Me and you are gonna cross." He looked at James. "You're gonna cover us from here, until we have the interior of that shop cleared. Then we'll call you across and handle this motherf.u.c.ker."

James fidgeted. "It'd be easier just to leave his a.s.s up there." He said it like he thought it was the best idea, like going across to kill the man seemed unsporting, like shooting a rabbit with a 12 gauge. "f.u.c.ker ain't gonna live too long as it is. Let's just get in the f.u.c.king van and get out of here."

"No." Shumate spat. "I'm not leavin' this up to chance. I shoulda killed that motherf.u.c.ker once already. He got away, and now I'm having to pay for it. He ain't getting' away again. No f.u.c.king way. We gotta kill him now. Tonight. No exceptions."

James shrugged like it didn't matter. "Whatever."

Shumate grew very serious. "Stay sharp when we're out there. I know this guy's beat the f.u.c.k up, but he was beat up when I first met him and it didn't slow him down much. I ain't saying he's a bada.s.s, I'm just saying it would be dangerous to underestimate him. Okay?"

Aaron nodded calmly.

James watched him, wondered if he felt the jangling nerves and was hiding it behind a mask, just like James. Probably not. Aaron was a cold-a.s.s b.a.s.t.a.r.d. James had never seen him lose his s.h.i.t, never seen him scared or shaken or even wide-eyed. Everything that ever happened to them, it seemed he'd been expecting it from the get-go and he greeted it with a deadpan expression, as if to say, "Yeah, I figured."

James didn't consciously think it, but inside his chest where the scared little kid was hiding, he wanted badly to be just like Aaron. He just wanted to be unafraid. He just wanted to live, and not always worry about dying. It took up so much of his time that he never actually thought about living. Not that there was much of a life to be had anymore.

"Aight," James scooted over to the window. "I gotcha guys covered."

Shumate touched him on the shoulder. "You see anything pop up on that roof, you put it down. You got that?"

"Yeah, I got it, man." James shook his head, as though he were miffed that Shumate felt the instructions needed repeating. "I got this s.h.i.t."

Behind his back, Shumate and Aaron exchanged a glance and just shook their heads.

James may have been a scared kid, but you don't live through the end of the world without being smart. At least when it came to survival, which often times came down to the little details that helped you shoot someone else, and not be shot yourself.

So, instinctively, he backed away from the window about two feet, kept his profile low. Not because some tactical range instructor had taught him this, but because in his own experience he knew that someone far behind a gla.s.s window was a lot harder to see than a person right up against it. He kept his body low because he knew it took away those precious angles-the angles that his opponent would try to use to land a bullet in him, while James used the angles to do the same.

Angles, angles.

It all came down to angles.

And yet I failed trigonometry.

He propped himself up slightly on his elbows, just enough to give the 50-round magazine of his AK an inch of clearance off the ground. Wasn't good to use the mag as a monopod. Made the gun jam. Sometimes it made the mag come off after firing.

Even in the failing light, he could make out the opposing rooftop nicely. It was a red brick building, but the top was crowned with white stone that stood out against the darkening sky. Captain Harden would be very visible, whenever he popped his head up to see what was going on.

"Keep an eye for us," Shumate said quietly from the darkness behind James.

The kid grunted. A nonverbal sound of confidence he didn't actually feel.

Behind him, the light sound of the steps creaking as Shumate and Aaron descended out of the attic s.p.a.ce. James didn't look back, but just pictured them disappearing into the stairwell, and he felt suddenly and irrevocably alone. Chilled, like a growing doubt that he'd see the sun again. And the thought broke through all the fake macho, tough-guy walls that he'd erected around himself, and he had the fleeting emotion of sadness. But he wasn't sure about what.

No reason to be sad, he told himself. You'll make it through this.

Because he'd made it through many other things. This was not the first time he'd felt that coldness in his gut. He settled his cheek onto the wooden stock of his rifle. Wondered how loud the blast was going to be in this attic s.p.a.ce. Probably pretty bad, at least until he'd shot the window out and the noise and the concussion had somewhere to go. He considered breaking the gla.s.s, but that thought was discarded almost immediately. Breaking gla.s.s was noisy. Shumate and Aaron would have a fit.

From his vantage point, set back from the window a few feet, he couldn't see down into the street. But he heard the creak of the front door opening. The building housed a little sporting goods store, mostly football stuff, but some other things as well. All the gla.s.s had been broken in the windows and the door, but there were bars on all of it, so that James had been able to reach his skinny arm through and unlock the front door when all h.e.l.l had broken loose and the street started filling with infected. He and Shumate and Aaron had run inside, quickly locking the front door behind them and bolting for the back rooms, hoping for someplace a little more secure.

The last James had glimpsed of the street, he'd seen the van, seen the infected pulling Kev's dead body out of the back. Ripping him to shreds. He'd looked away. Couldn't bear to watch it for some reason. Wasn't sure why.

It was strange. He would have thought the amount of violence and bloodshed he'd witnessed would have inoculated him to the shock of it, but it sometimes felt like it was only making him more sensitive. Like every time he saw someone ripped apart, or when Shumate or Aaron shot some poor hobo, it took off a layer of his skin. Until he felt flayed. Laid open. Every dust mote a piercing needle. Every breeze a wash of acid.

Then other times it didn't affect him at all.

Honestly he didn't know which was worse.

He breathed heavily, and it carried across to the window, fogging it for a second before it dissipated. He closed his mouth, breathed through his nose. Fog behind the gla.s.s could've been a giveaway if someone watched the window.

Though he couldn't see the street below, he could see just a sliver of the sidewalk on the opposite side, and the window was wide enough that he had a fairly panoramic view. Far to the right, he saw the murky flutter of two shapes, one quickly following the other, disappear around the corner of a building and blend into the darkness.

It made his heart jump, though he knew it was Shumate and Aaron. If you didn't jump when you saw things sneaking around, you probably wouldn't last long. Paranoia is an ally when it seemed the world was out to kill you. Plagues. Madmen caused by the plagues. Dangerous men caused by the collapse of law and order...

He almost scoffed at himself.

Hated cops when they were around. Disliked Shumate for being one before the collapse. Felt like they were out to get him. Never took a moment to consider that there were worse things than paying fines and going to jail. Things that had somehow been kept at bay by all those self-righteous motherf.u.c.kers with their badges and guns.

I can take care of myself, he used to say. And it was true. He didn't need a f.u.c.king cop to defend him. But what he wouldn't give now to be able to hop in a truck and take a drive without worrying about running into some rednecks at a roadblock and taking a bullet. What he wouldn't give to meet a girl and be able to have a normal conversation because she knew he wasn't going to put a gun to her head and rape her.

That got him thinking about Sh.e.l.ley, and that made him drop the whole d.a.m.n subject. He wouldn't shed a tear for the b.i.t.c.h, but there was something undeniably s.h.i.tty about how it ended for her. How miserable the last months of her life had been. How she just deluded herself into thinking that it was okay. Like an addict. Except she never did it for drugs, she did it for safety. She was addicted to feeling safe.

And now she was just a pile of bones.

A bloodstain on the road.

Few patches of hair and skin.

Maybe some teeth.

Just drop it...

Across the street and slightly to the left, the two shadows reappeared. They looked up at James, hiding behind his window, their faces blue in the twilight. Shumate gave him a nod, and then the two began to move towards the door to the shop that they'd seen Captain Harden slip into. The door that now hung open, shattered by the horde that had come through, looking for flesh. Looking for food.

They slipped into the darkness.

James swallowed hard, watching them enter that place.

Like a dragon's lair. Like a spider hole. You go in. You don't come out.

Funny how after all those mental gymnastics to turn Captain Harden into Donald Weathers, to minimize him to the level of an alcohol-addled b.u.m, he couldn't get rid of the knot in his stomach.

James squinted slightly, waiting for the muzzle flashes to light up the interior of the antique shop. Waited for the rapid pop-pop-pop of a gunfight. Bullets whizzing everywhere. Shattering through Grandma's old rocking chair. Shumate and Aaron trying to hide behind musty old wood while Captain Harden moved like a ghost and tore them apart with the use of some strange, field-expedient weapons he'd constructed from old cedar chests and gla.s.s figurines.

James puffed his lips out. "Bulls.h.i.t," he mumbled. "That f.u.c.ker's almost dead already."

He felt a slight p.r.i.c.k on the back of his neck.

First thought: Spider! And he almost reached up to swat the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but then all at once he smelled the smell of strong, rank body odor-someone else's body odor-and felt the cold, iron-like grip on his shoulder.

The voice was barely a whisper, but it held all the substance of an anvil falling. "Don't move."

A million options, a million thoughts.

Terror screeching like locked tires.

To fight? To give up? The hand was incredibly strong, the voice resolute. He had snuck up on him good, took him by surprise. A nightmare of how Donald Weathers might have been had he not been pa.s.s-out-drunk that night in the woods.

The spider bite was a knife-had to be. Right at the base of his skull, and James just thought about his skinny neck, the fragile vertebrae just underneath his skin, such a weak defense for his spinal column, now that he thought of it. One shove, and he'd be gone.

Strangely, he felt the fear, but also something else. It was not peace. It was more like just...stopping. Like the zebra in the nature films when three lions are dragging it to the ground. The look in the animal's eyes after it realizes that no amount of kicking and screaming and scratching and biting is going to get it out of the situation it is in. The inevitability of it. And somehow, the strange release. The freedom of no longer having to think about your next step.

The look in that zebra's eyes.

Like, Well...s.h.i.t...

James took his hand off the AK. Took his finger off the trigger, and realized in a split-second epiphany that that was all Captain Harden wanted him to do. Just take that finger off the trigger so that when the knife severed the spinal column, he didn't pull off a round and alert the others.

Well...s.h.i.t...

CHAPTER 22: GONE.

Lee plucked the knife from the back of the man's head. Man was a generous term. Boy was more like it. But a boy with an AK-47 wasn't a boy at all. He was a hostile. A threat. A target to be neutralized.

He looked down at the figure, lying there, face to the ground. Just a small drip of blood coming from the wound in his neck where the knife had slipped in between the vertebrae with a fatal sc.r.a.pe of bone. He did feel pity. Pity like you might feel for an animal that had stepped out in front of traffic. Stepped out and tangled with things it didn't understand.

Stupid, Lee thought, remembering hazily the way the kid had talked. The tough guy, always trying to impress the others and failing miserably. And that was the extent of the thought that he gave to the kid he'd known as James. He wiped the blade off on his pants, like he was wiping away what little emotion he could muster.

He slipped the knife back into its sheath.

Nausea roiled, the room swam.

He closed his eyes, breathed deep. When the swirling feeling went away, he blinked a few times, then looked around to see if perhaps they'd had some supplies they'd carried with them into the attic. But there was nothing. Just dusty old pieces of outdated sports equipment, languishing in the corners. Perhaps saved as memorabilia. Who knew.

Lee bent down, grabbed the AK-47 up off the ground, then backed up a few paces. He stood there for a moment, gathering his thoughts. Staring out the half-moon window in front of him like a high diver might stare at the pool below him. Planning it out. Going through the motions in his head. Knowing he only had one chance to get it right.

He realized his eyes were closed. His mind wandered into some half-light dream state, then jerked back, still holding the threads of whatever his subconscious was weaving. Something about money. Something about bullets being currency. He rode out a wave of sickness, then refocused himself.

Almost there.

He pulled the M4 he'd taken from Kev off his back and set it on the floor by his feet. He would need to make a fast transition from the AK to the M4. From his current vantage point, he could not see the street through the window, but he could see the front door of the antiques shop where he'd been. And he could see the roof. Where Deuce was still probably pacing about, wondering why he'd been abandoned by yet another human.

"I'm comin' back, buddy." The words came out of his mouth in a slurry.

He was in bad shape. How he'd managed to sneak up on the kid, he didn't know. He could barely remember coming up the stairs into the attic s.p.a.ce. Remembered slipping down through the buildings and across the street a few blocks down, working his way towards the building where he now was. He remembered seeing Shumate and the Quiet Man slip out the front door of the shop and scurry down and across. He'd been in the shadows not thirty feet from them.

Then the s.p.a.ce between when he'd entered the door they'd left open, and when he stood behind the kid in the attic s.p.a.ce was kind of a blur. Like he was drunk. Bits and pieces left out. The chronology of it skewed.

Bad shape, but still operating.

Good to go.

With the M4 at his feet, he shouldered the AK-47 and pointed it towards the rooftop, but slightly down and to the right-didn't want to accidentally shoot Deuce. His only hope was that his position inside the building would m.u.f.fle the sound of the gunshots enough so that they didn't draw the attention of the infected.

He took a breath and pulled the trigger. Five shots, randomly s.p.a.ced. The rounds punched jagged holes in the window-one, two-and then the window shattered completely. If Lee could have heard the crashing gla.s.s over the ringing in his ears, he would have winced at the racket, but there was nothing else that could be done.