He parks the truck between the carcass of a wrecked sedan and a pillar of tires. A moment later, the engine cuts off and Megan hears the squeak of the passenger door and the heavy thud of Josh Lee Hamilton stepping out and coming around the back of the camper.
“Y’all stay put for a second,” Josh says softly, evenly, after opening the camper door and seeing Megan and Scott crouched near the hatch like a couple of owls. Josh doesn’t notice the blood spatters on the walls. He checks the cylinder of his .38, the blue steel gleaming in the darkness. “Gonna check this place for walkers.”
“I don’t mean to be rude but what the fuck?” Megan says, her buzz completely gone now, replaced by a kind of jagged adrenaline surge. “Didn’t you guys see what happened back here? Didn’t you hear what was going on?”
Josh looks at her. “All I heard was a couple of potheads partying to beat the band—smells like Mardi Gras in a whorehouse back here.”
Megan tells him what happened.
Josh gives Scott a look. “Surprised you had the wherewithal … your brain scrambled like that.” Josh’s expression softens. He lets out a sigh and smiles at the kid. “Congratulations, junior.”
Scott gives him a cockeyed little grin. “My first kill, boss.”
“Chances are it won’t be your last,” Josh says, snapping the cylinder shut.
“Can I just like ask one more thing?” Megan says then. “What’re we doing here? I thought we had enough gas.”
“It’s too hairy out there for night travel. Best to hunker down till morning. Gonna need you two to stay put until you get the all clear.”
Josh walks off.
Megan shuts the door. In the darkness, she feels Scott’s gaze on her. She turns and looks at him. He has a weird look in his eyes. She grins at him. “Dude, I gotta admit, you are pretty damn handy with the garden tools—pretty goddamn bad-ass with that pitchfork.”
He grins back at her. Something changes in his eyes, as though he sees her for the first time—despite the darkness—and he licks his lips. He wipes a strand of dirty blond hair from his eyes. “It was nothing.”
“Yeah, right.” For a while now, Megan has been marveling at how much Scott Moon resembles Kurt Cobain. The resemblance seems to radiate off him with atavistic magic, his face shimmering in the darkness, his scent—patchouli oil and smoke and sweet-leaf and bubble gum—casting out and swirling in Megan’s brain.
She grabs him and mashes her lips on top of his, and he pulls her hair, and grinds his mouth into hers, and soon their tongues are intertwined and their midsections are gnashing against each other.
“Fuck me,” she whispers.
“Here?” he utters. “Now?”
“Maybe not,” she says, looking around, breathless. Her heart races. “Let’s wait until he’s done inside and we’ll find a place.”
“Cool,” he says, and he reaches out and fondles her through her torn Grateful Dead T-shirt. She jams her tongue in his mouth. Megan needs him now, this instant—she needs relief, badly.
She pulls away. In the darkness, the twosome stare at each other, breathing hard, like wild animals that would kill each other if they weren’t the same species.
* * *
Megan and Scott find a place to consummate their lust only moments after Josh issues the all clear.
The two stoners don’t fool anybody, in spite of their perfunctory attempts to be discreet: Megan feigns exhaustion and Scott suggests that he fix her a place to sleep on the floor of the storeroom in the rear of the retail shop. The cramped storage area—two hundred square feet of mildewed tile and exposed plumbing—reeks of dead fish and cheese bait. Josh tells them to be careful and rolls his eyes as he walks away, disgusted, and maybe, just maybe, a little jealous.
The thumping sounds start up almost immediately, even before Josh returns to the office, where Lilly and Bob are unpacking a knapsack full of supplies for the night. “What the hell is that?” Lilly asks the big man when he returns.
Josh shakes his head. The muffled thudding noises of two bodies going at it in the other room reverberate through the tight quarters of the filling station. Every few moments, a gasp or a moan swells above the rhythmic fucking sounds. “Young love,” he says with exasperation.
“You gotta be kidding me.” Lilly stands shivering in the dark front office as Bob Stookey nervously unpacks bottled water and blankets from a crate, pretending not to hear the carnal noises. Lilly holds herself as though she might disintegrate at any moment. “So this is what we have to look forward to?”
The power at Fortnoy’s is down, the fuel reservoirs empty, and the air in the building as cold as a walk-in refrigerator. The retail shop appears to be picked clean. Even the filthy refrigerator is emptied of earthworms and minnows. The front office features a dusty rack of magazines, a single vending machine running low on stale candy bars and bags of chips, rolls of toilet paper, a few overturned plastic contour chairs, a shelf of antifreeze and car deodorizers, and a scarred wooden counter on which sits a cash register that looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. The register’s drawer is open and empty.
“Maybe they’ll get it out of their systems.” Josh checks his last cigar, which sits partially burned down in his jacket pocket. He glances around the office for a smoke rack. The place looks ransacked. “Looks like the Fortnoy boys left in a hurry.”
Lilly touches her bruised eye. “Yeah, I guess the looters got here before we did.”
“How you holdin’ up?” Josh asks her.
“I’ll live.”
Bob glances up from his crate of supplies. “Have a seat, Lillygirl.” He positions one of the contour chairs against the window. The light of the harvest moon shines in and stripes the floor in silver dusty shadows as Bob cleans his hands with a sterile wipe. “Let’s check them bandages.”
Josh watches as Lilly takes a seat and Bob opens a first-aid kit.
“Hold still now,” Bob admonishes softly as he carefully dabs an alcohol wipe around the crusty edges of Lilly’s injured eye. The skin under her brow has swollen to the size of a hardboiled egg. Lilly keeps flinching, and that bothers Josh. He bites back the urge to go to her, to hold her, to stroke her downy soft hair. The sight of those wavy mahogany tendrils dangling down across her narrow, delicate, bruised face is killing the big man.
“Ouch!” Lilly cringes. “Go easy, Bob.”
“Got a nasty shiner there, but if we can keep it clean, you oughtta be good to go.”
“Go where?”
“That’s a damn good question.” Bob carefully unhooks the Ace bandage around her ribs, gently palpates the bruised areas with his fingertips. Lilly flinches again. “Ribs ought to heal on their own, as long as you don’t get into any wrestling matches or marathon races.”
Bob replaces the elastic bandage around her midriff, then puts a fresh butterfly bandage on her eye. Lilly gazes up at the big man. “What are you thinking, Josh?”
Josh looks around the place. “We’ll spend the night here, take turns keeping watch.”
Bob tears off a piece of surgical tape. “Gonna get colder than a witch’s boob in here.”
Josh sighs. “Saw a generator in the garage, and we got blankets. Place is pretty secure and we’re up high enough on this ridge to see any large numbers of them things forming out there before they get to us.”
Bob finishes up and closes the first-aid kit. The muffled sounds of fornication dwindle in the other room, a momentary break in the action. In that brief stretch of silence, over the sound of the wind rattling the signage out front, Josh hears the distant a cappella of the dead—that faint telltale throb of dead vocal cords—like a broken pipe organ, moaning and gurgling in atonal unison. The noise stiffens the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.