ONE
At first glance, the figures now wandering through this grid of perfectly decorated interiors might be mistaken for masters of the manor, residents of some gracious old mansion strolling the confines of their burnished mahogany corridors and richly appointed parlors. They bump into each other occasionally, and sometimes they lift their pasty white faces to the ceiling to let out primordial, snarling yawps, but for the most part they look at home in these showrooms and alcoves arranged with such pristine taste. One of the denizens has now accidentally fallen backward onto a Scandinavian-designed divan, his ropy purple intestines spilling out of him in braided glistening strands. The former auto mechanic—still clad in a tattered work shirt with the needlepointed name FRED still visible on its breast pocket—slouches languidly there for a moment as if taking a break from his aimless meandering, his head drooping, his mouth oozing black tarry drool. A stark art deco lamp next to the creature—which is currently running off a generator—illuminates the scene with soft, diffuse, flickering light as delicate as moth wings. Other cadavers mill about a dining room sectioned off in onyx, lacquered dividers with Chinese calligraphy etched into the creamy surfaces. A tall Hepplewhite mirror framed in gleaming teak and cherrywood reflects a cluster of the dead scraping past walnut bookcases filled with artificial facades of book spines. These imitation books are stamped with the gilded titles of tomes nobody reads anymore because the reading of fictional strife has become such a luxury: To Kill a Mockingbird, Treasure Island, War and Peace, and Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Beyond the reflection, stretching in all directions, myriad variations of these high-quality, modestly priced rooms in all manner of styles and arrangements create a maze in which dozens more reanimated corpses now mill about and shuffle like slow-moving laboratory rats … until the first shot rings out.
It comes from the darkness beneath an emergency exit sign on the far side of the floor. It’s a small-caliber blast—the report dampened by a noise suppressor—which makes a sound like a hammer striking metal. The walker on the divan whiplashes, a fountain of blood mist and fluids spraying out the back of its skull, creating an impromptu Jackson Pollock blot across the designer drapes behind it. The creature instantly slides down across the front of the cushions, collapsing onto the lovely handwoven Bjork-series throw rug.
More shots ring out from other directions—mostly .38-caliber and under—blowing tunnels through the heads of at least half a dozen more of the dead. Skulls burst open and bodies plunge to the floor en masse, defacing the sparkling furniture with the vandalism of cranial fluids, bile, and blood.
The commotion gets the attention of the remaining fifteen or so walkers, most of them slowly, drunkenly pivoting toward the noise and confusion of their brethren falling around them. Rancid mouths gape open, the creaky vocalizations like steam emanating from the dead concavities of their throats. Figures press in from the shadows behind the monsters, slipping through the gaps between austere oriental room dividers and glass-fronted knickknack shelves.
A stout black woman in a do-rag and dashiki drives a fireplace poker into the temple of the closest walker. An olive-skinned bodybuilder in a wifebeater and love beads closes in from the other side of the floor, swinging a machete in quick succession, shearing open the tops of three dead skulls with the efficiency of a gardener weeding a garden. Behind the bodybuilder, the woman who fired the first shot approaches. Thin, weathered, auburn hair in a tight ponytail, green eyes like a cat, dressed in a Georgia Tech T-shirt, with black cigarette jeans and combat boots, she grips her Ruger .22-caliber pistol in the classic Weaver position—Israeli commando style—her free hand cupped under the grip for stability. She has a full magazine in the firearm, ten rounds, one already gone, and she expertly picks off nine more creatures, one at a time, hardly pausing between blasts.
More humans appear on the periphery—an older, balding man in wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a beefy, bearded, potbellied man in denim, and a teenage boy with sun-freckled skin and an earnest face—each firing on the remaining few walkers with their handguns.
Within seconds, the unexpected infestation of walkers on the ground floor of the huge Atlanta Ikea is foiled in a haze of blue smoke, the ensuing silence as jarring as an earthquake. The store’s inhabitants stand around for a moment, stunned by the abrupt absence of sound (other than a faint dripping noise), looking at each other expectantly. Eventually all eyes turn to the woman with the auburn ponytail—the leader—for further direction.
Lilly Caul slowly holsters her pistol. She can hear the faint evidence of intruders lurking nearby, their breathing barely audible above the dripping noises. Lilly puts her right index finger to her lips, shushing everybody and indicating that no one should relax quite yet. One last task remains to be performed. She points at Tommy, then at Boone, then at Stankowski, and then at Norma, gesturing for them to move behind the cover of the room dividers.
Then she motions to the bodybuilder, Musolino, to follow her.
The big olive-skinned man follows Lilly as she creeps around a row of tall armoires filled with faux glassware and fake mementos. Despite the fact that she spends most of her time on the third floor, in the cafeteria, and in the section of the store earmarked for bedroom sets, she knows practically every square inch of the first floor from studying the store map and walking the corridors, making notes, memorizing every nook and cranny, every potential resource to be cannibalized. Ironically, that’s the best word for what she and the others have been doing—cannibalizing this massive home furnishings center on Atlanta’s north side. Now she has to once again do the dirty work that ensures their safety inside the massive cathedral of consumerism.
In a series of silent hand gestures, she leads Musolino down a narrow service corridor. At the end of the corridor, an unmarked iron door is reinforced with a massive timber across its midsection. Lilly carefully lifts the timber out of its cradle, and then cautiously unbolts the door. She pushes the thing open a few inches.
The rain and wind greet her, the ruins of Atlanta rising in the distance like ancient Mayan temples petrified and blackened by time. The sky hangs low over Ikea’s parking lot, which is littered with human remains and glittering particles of broken glass. The rain blows in great billowing sheets across the scabrous pavement. Musolino wants to build a barricade of razor wire around the ground level but Lilly has vetoed the idea, despite the fact that they’ve had to neutralize several assaults on the place over the last three months. Lilly still believes a barricade would merely draw attention to the treasures inside.
Right then, Lilly sees the broken planking lying around the base of the tall display windows on the south corner of the building. She can see the breach through which the walkers were let in.
She looks at Musolino, gives him a dour nod, and then ejects the spent magazine from the Ruger. She pulls a fresh mag from her belt and shoves it into the receiving port. “Let’s go ahead and finish this thing,” she says.
* * *
The two filthy, emaciated men, each dressed in blood-splattered rags, crouch behind a service door. They each have a .38-caliber revolver, each looking as though it was first used in World War II. They have the shakes and the hundred-yard stares of longtime junkies. The younger one, his eyes rimmed in dark circles from sleepless nights and unrelenting stress, whispers hoarsely, “What now? What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”
“You stupid fucking idiot,” the older one hisses. “We were supposed to go in and fucking take them when the walkers had them distracted!”
“There were more of them than I thought. They had more firepower than I thought.”
“Duh … ya think?”
“But Ollie said there was only—”
“What the fuck does Ollie know about it?! He’s a fucking ice head.”
“Should we get out of here?”
The older one starts to answer when he hears the telltale click of a hammer being drawn back behind him, in the shadows of the stockroom. “Oh fuck, oh Jesus,” he says in a voice suddenly filled with remorse, sadness, and regret. He doesn’t even have to turn around.
* * *
Lilly Caul stands behind the intruders. She holds the muzzle of the Ruger mere inches away from the back of the older one’s head. “I’m gonna need both of you to drop those guns,” she says. She speaks in a steady, even, flat tone. “Don’t turn around, don’t say anything, just do it.”
The older one clears his throat. “Okay … got it. Don’t shoot.”
“Please don’t waste us,” the younger one implores in his tattered voice, which is already crumbling into tears. He looks down at the floor in front of him, a child caught with his hand in the till. “We ran out of everything. We have no food, no water … we just wanted to—”
“Excuse me.” Lilly is strictly business. The men do not turn around. They look down, a lot of swallowing and licking of lips going on. Lilly does not raise her voice. “I asked you both to drop the guns, and I will not ask you again. Drop the fucking guns.”
They do what she asks. The guns clatter to the tiles. The older one says, “Can I say something?”
Lilly squeezes off a single shot into the back of the older one’s head.
The loud report—dampened by the noise suppressor—snaps like a firecracker in the enclosed space. The bullet exits out the man’s left eye in a plume of blood mist, the impact sending him folding over and banging his skull on the doorjamb before sinking to the floor in a series of death-rattle twitches.
The younger one is in the process of whirling around when Lilly sends the second round into his temple. He convulses as the blood cloud spits out the other side and strikes the corridor wall in a sticky scarlet rosette three feet wide. The young man keels sideways, collapsing to the floor in a heap of soiled fabric and trembling flesh.
Musolino stands there, two-handing his 9-millimeter Glock, training the muzzle on the still-warm bodies as if they might sit back up or turn at any moment. At length, he relaxes and thumbs the hammer back down and lets out a thin, whispery breath of relief.
Lilly has not said another word. Ears ringing, she shoves the hot pistol down the back of her belt, kneels, and reaches down to the carotid pulse point on each man’s neck. The older one has already expired. The younger one still has a feeble, birdlike pulse. Lilly waits until it fades away before murmuring, “Okay, we’re good.”
Musolino shoves the Glock back in its holster and kneels next to Lilly.
She picks up each of the .38 revolvers, snaps open their cylinders, and dumps the empties on the floor next to the dead bodies. She sorts through the rounds, plucking the useable ones up and stashing them in her back pocket. Then she gives one of the guns to Musolino and shoves the other one down the other side of her belt.
They drag the bodies back down the service corridor and out the exit.
The rain swirls around them as they pull the bodies across the concrete apron. There’s a large dumpster on the other side of the loading dock, half-filled with the remains of walkers that have breached the building’s weak spots. Lilly and Musolino drag the bodies over to the receptacle, lift the lid back, flinch at the smell, and heave the two corpses inside the enclosure.
The lid drops down with a resounding metallic bang as they head back inside.
* * *
Back on the third floor, after securing the damaged barricades and leaky doorways along the porous ground level and removing the walker remains from the maze of model living rooms, Lilly takes a few minutes to gather her bearings in the bathroom. She washes the blood stipple from her cheeks and arms and fingernails. She looks at her hand. She holds it up into the lantern light and notes how rock-steady it is. Not a single tremor of nervous tension. She wipes her wet hair with a towel and changes out of her rain-soaked sweats. She puts on an REM T-shirt and fresh jeans. She pauses.
Her reflection stares back at her from the mirror. The face is unfamiliar to her. This is not the face of a thirty-four-year-old woman. Nor is it the malnourished face of a frightened, cornered animal, which she has resembled in the recent past. Instead, what she sees gazing back at her now through the looking glass is an indigenous native of the apocalypse—cold, gaunt, deeply lined, cobra-calm, eyes sunken and fixed in their dark sockets. In fact, it takes a little searching to find the maternal spark behind her soft green irises, but it’s there.
Being an accidental mother is what drives Lilly now; it’s the hard carapace protecting her heart, the steel girders reinforcing her nerves, the source of her willingness to kill and her instinct to survive and her singular goal of protecting her children through any means necessary. And it’s what makes her heart leap when she hears the little fist banging on the ladies’ room door.
“Lilly?” The muffled and yet unmistakable voice of Bethany Dupree rings out behind the door. “You in there? They said to come get you.”
Lilly finishes up at the sink, gives herself one last look, and then opens the door. “Hey there, Fluffer-Nutter! What are you, the sergeant at arms?”
“Huh?” The twelve-year-old has an old-soul face hardened by stress and contrasted by a profusion of freckles. Her pigtails are meticulously maintained by Lilly, and she wears a dirty cardigan sweater over her pinafore dress. “What’s a surgeon in arms anyway?”
“Never mind—c’mere.” Lilly pulls the girl into a hug. “Is everybody in the cafeteria?”
Bethany nods and wriggles out of the embrace. “C’mon, they’re waiting for you.”
* * *
Over the last three months, the inhabitants of the Ikea have made their individual territorial claims in different quadrants of the third floor. The adults have meticulously sectioned off portions of the luxury wing with its shag carpet and king-sized beds brimming with oversized pillows and lush thousand-thread-count linens. The young ones have each chosen their own domain in the children’s area, making elaborate dividers and forts out of bookcases and fiberglass room organizers.
Norma Sutters has made her bedroom in one of the cafeteria back offices—most likely a former administrative area—from which she can have easy access to the kitchen. Norma has taken it upon herself to be the group’s short-order cook, turning the sealed, freeze-dried packages of food stacked to the ceilings in the vast pantry area into improvised concoctions of savory soul food. She has taken great pride in her creations, some of them with names like Mac-Daddy Meatballs and Mama’s Down-Home Muesli. The unspoiled Ikea restaurant has proven to be a godsend. Most of the fresh food left over after the great exodus out of the city had rotted into dust, but many items still in storage have been designed and packed for a long shelf life. And with the advent of generated power, Norma can heat, fry, bake, broil, or scramble anything the pantry has to offer.
They’re all waiting for Lilly in the restaurant’s main seating area.
As big as an airplane hangar, and outfitted with enough polished wooden booths to seat a small army, the dining room is bordered by gleaming stainless steel buffet stations from which weary patrons—their eyes glazed from merchandise overload—would sheepishly line up and order inexpensive dinners. In many ways, the old Ikeas operated in the manner of casinos. Food and drink were provided at either no cost or nominal fees in order to keep the gamblers gambling, and in this case, to keep the shoppers shopping. The convivial scent of coffee and cinnamon hangs in the air.
“Thanks, everybody,” Lilly says a moment later, after the group has settled down and gathered around her. Even the kids have all paused from the games on the far side of the room and have taken seats on the floor in front of her as though expecting her to sing a ditty for them or teach them about adjectives and adverbs. “After tonight’s little adventures on the first floor, I can’t hold back something I’ve been wanting to say for a while now.” She pauses. Swallows. Takes a breath. “We have to leave this place.”
For the briefest instant, the room seems to seize up with thunderstruck silence. Around Lilly, on the floor, the faces of the children gawk up at her as though she’d just shat on their birthday cakes. To Lilly’s immediate left, Musolino hops off his perch on the pass-through counter and silently begins to pace, hands in his pockets, a pensive look on his face. On the other side of the room, Norma Sutters comes around from behind the serving counter, wiping her plump hands on a dish towel. “You know … my hearing ain’t too good anymore.” She looks askance at Lilly as though smelling something bad. “I could have sworn I just heard you say ‘leave this place.’”
Lilly smiles. “Okay, I know we’ve talked about this before. I realize how great this place is, we all do. We got all this luxury, supplies, food, generators. It’s a place worth fighting for. I get that. But the city’s just getting too dangerous.”
Norma shakes her head. “Honey, it’s always been dangerous.”
“Our exposure here is just too great,” Lilly persists. “We’re going to be repelling attacks like the one today on an hourly basis, we don’t leave.”
Across the room, a middle-aged man in a Braves baseball cap sitting next to Tommy Dupree speaks up. “I don’t mean to be the one who poops on your party, Lilly, but I’m willing to risk it.” Potbellied, goateed, as beefy as a Mack truck, Burt Stankowski is a former long-haul trucker who was among the original six people who discovered the postplague Shangri-la of the Ikea. “We can build better barricades, countermeasures … we can camouflage the place better. There’s a lot we can do.”
Lilly looks at the man. “Much of which is only going to draw attention to the place.”
“This is a big step you’re talking about.” The woman over by the steam table speaks with a clipped Jersey accent. Dark skinned, her raven-black hair perpetually done up in a bun, Eve Betts was a receptionist in a dental office before the Big Turn. “You sure you’ve weighed the pros and cons? I kind of agree with Burt.”
“Look. We’re sitting ducks here.” Lilly’s chest tightens with anger. She just killed two young men in cold blood, neither of whom truly deserved to die. “We’ve got targets on our backs. You really want to live like that? Constantly looking over your shoulder?”
Norma pipes up. “Correct me if I’m wrong, Lilly, but isn’t it gonna be like that no matter where you live?”
“Norma, that’s not what I’m—”
“May I ask a question?” The voice comes from a slender wisp of a woman perched on one of the adjacent serving counters. She holds a baby in her arms, one hand pressing a pacifier into the infant’s mouth. The baby is a recent addition, rescued from the derelict Atlanta Medical Center by Lilly and Tommy. The baby—name and age unknown—has been dubbed “Doe” by Tommy, as in Jane Doe. The woman holding the child has become its ersatz nanny. With her long, thin, dishwater-blond hair, and her faded peasant dresses, Sophie Leland comes off as a refugee from Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. But beneath the surface of her dreamy Joni Mitchell exterior is a street-tough former prostitute from Athens, Georgia, who has survived the plague on sheer grit. Right now, though, she looks concerned. Not worried. Sophie Leland is not a worrier. She just looks a tad concerned. “Are you talking about leaving immediately or what? In weeks … months?”
Lilly sighs. “The sooner the better, Sophie, to be honest. We’re running low on ammo, and we’re drawing more and more walkers every time we stave off an attack. We’re getting more vulnerable every day.”
Tommy Dupree raises his hand as though he’s in social studies class. The ruddy-complexioned fifteen-year-old doesn’t look up, doesn’t say anything, just keeps staring with a somber expression at the tabletop.
Lilly sees the young man’s hand in the air and smiles sadly despite the tension in the room. “Tommy, this isn’t Room 222. You don’t have to raise your hand, you can just speak up.”
The boy’s hand goes down. He calmly looks up at the others and says, “I don’t care what the rest of y’all do … I’m with Lilly a thousand percent.” He turns and aims his intense brown eyes at Lilly Caul. “You want to bail on this place, Lilly, I’m right behind you. I’m with you. I got your back. End of story.”
Lilly smiles at the boy and feels a tight, hot pinch of emotion in her belly. God bless this raggedy kid. Lilly Caul has wanted to be a mother from the time she was a teenager in Marietta, getting As in family and consumer sciences class and scrapbooking photos of babies. At the time, she idolized her social studies teacher, Mrs. Whitman, a woman who walked around the neighborhood with an infant on one hip, a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, and a Virginia Woolf novel in her free hand. In those days, a lot of women were talking about the myth of “having it all”—domestic bliss, career success, a flat tummy, and hot sex—but Lilly knew in her deepest heart of hearts that “having it all” meant the love of a child. It dwarfed all other considerations. Unfortunately for Lilly, life had gotten in the way. She had slogged through her twenties without ever enjoying a serious relationship that might have led to children. And ironically, it was not until the world fell to a brutal, inexplicable pandemic that she finally began to scratch that powerful itch.
At the present moment, though—before Lilly can respond to the boy’s poignant mission statement—Boone speaks up from a table near the window. “Lilly, I have to ask the obvious question.” The former social worker from Jacksonville gazes intently at Lilly through his round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses. “I think I know the answer but I’ll ask it anyway. Where exactly do you plan on going?”
Another long sigh escapes from deep within Lilly’s lungs as she surrenders to the obvious. “Boone, you know exactly where I want to go. Why pretend?” She scans the cafeteria, looking at each person. “You all know good and well where I want to go. Might as well lay the cards on the table.”
An awkward beat of silence ensues, the kids studying all the adult faces as if there were secrets being kept all of a sudden. At last, Musolino stops pacing and directs his attention to Lilly. “Okay, I’m sorry. I have to say it. You’re obsessed with that place. The fact that you would even suggest going back there … after what we found last week? I don’t get it.”
Lilly looks down at the floor, formulating a response, even though she knows the big man has a point.
* * *
Located in the vast patchwork quilt of tobacco fields seventy miles south of Atlanta, the little railroad town of Woodbury, Georgia, has come to represent something so powerful and so important to Lilly that she would be hard-pressed to reduce it to words. It is a place of tragedy, violence, and heartbreak. It has been the home of horrible events and sinister people, such as the tyrannical Philip Blake, aka the Governor, the man who dragged Lilly into a quagmire of evil, ultimately turning her into a killer. But after Blake had been vanquished, and Lilly had become the pro tem leader of the town, something began to grow within her—a dream, a vision of the future. Deep down in her heart, Lilly Caul has begun to think of Woodbury as a symbol of something deeper than a mere place on a map.
For Lilly, the town has come to represent the quest for a normal life.
Recent months, however, have not been kind to the dream. The town’s once tightly knit group of inhabitants have been scattered to the winds. The man whom Lilly had chosen to stay behind and care for the fortified, walled-in village—David Stern—has vanished without a trace. Not a single one of the crank-powered two-way radios that once connected the network of neighboring settlements has survived the tumult of past months, and now Lilly prays that David survived the mysterious conflagration that was discovered by a small search party sent out eleven days ago.
Lilly will never forget what she saw as they rounded the corner of Highway 85 and Jones Mill Road. A low, black haze hung over the center of town, and steeples and roof pitches as far away as Riggins Ferry Road still smoldered like Dresden after the firestorms of World War II. Scorched wreckage and debris littered the deserted lots and fields, radiating outward from the embers of ground zero. The air smelled of brimstone and charred flesh, and it was impossible to distinguish between the remains of walkers and humans that lay scattered like ashy dead leaves across the outskirts of town. It looked as though someone had dropped a bomb on the place—many bombs, in fact—and it broke Lilly’s heart.
But it did not break her will.
“Okay, fair enough,” Lilly finally says in response to Musolino’s rhetorical question. “Yeah, I’m obsessed … obsessed with building a permanent home, a place we can breathe … a place we can count on. Woodbury is our home. For better or for worse.” She looks at the others. “No matter how great this place is, you can’t deny it’s only temporary. You mark my words. There’s going to come a day, somebody launches an assault on this place that we can’t stave off. Believe me, it’s only a matter of time.”
The others exchange skeptical glances, and Lilly can see she hasn’t sold them on the idea. Boone has taken off his trademark John Lennon eyeglasses, and now he thoughtfully wipes them with a handkerchief, looking as though he’s about to say something. Lilly watches him. “Go ahead, Boone,” she says at last. “Speak up, speak your mind.”
He puts his glasses back on. “Okay, for starters, the place is not even there anymore. Most of the main buildings have burned to the ground. There’s nothing to return to. It’s just a pile of smoldering ruins.”
Before Lilly gets a chance to respond, Norma Sutters chimes in again. “Seems to me, it wouldn’t matter if Woodbury was the damn Taj Mahal, it ain’t ever gonna compare to the quality of life we got going in this place right here. Right?” She looks at the others as if she might ask for a hallelujah or launch into a gospel hymn at any moment. “Am I crazy? Why in God’s name would we want to walk away from this place? Sure, we gotta deal with yahoos trying to steal it away from us, but I gotta think it’s better than starting over someplace else with nothing.”
Lilly swallows hard, pushing back her emotions, trying to stay calm. “I get what you’re saying. I really do. But most of the brick buildings in Woodbury are still standing, and all those little cottages and ranch homes along Flat Shoals Road were untouched by the fires. It’s still the perfect-sized place to settle down in. It’s containable. It’s manageable. We were almost there a few months ago. We had crops. We had solar cells. We just have to be more careful. That’s all. Like Burt says, we just have to build better walls.” She pauses, letting it sink in. She studies the faces. She softens. “I totally understand why you’d want to stay put here. But you have to trust me on this. We’re living on the Titanic. It’s gonna sink. Sooner or later. Believe me. It’s going down.”
Now the others sit mute, sullen, many of them staring at the floor. The muffled drone of incessant, unending rain on the roof accompanies the silence.
“Which brings me to the best part.” Lilly says this with a touch of mania in her voice. She feels adrenaline crackling within her, a bracing surge of energy as brisk as a snort of smelling salts. “Yes, we have to leave this place.” She looks at each of them with the fervor of an evangelist recruiting new souls. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t take it with us.”
A long beat of silence follows, many of those present looking at Lilly as though she has finally lost her mind.
Copyright © 2017 by Robert Kirkman LLC
