Josh takes one last glance at the surreal intruders closing in on him.
Behind the midgets, stumbling down the embankment, comes a motley assortment of dead performers. A giant strong man with a handlebar mustache and musculature torn open in bloody gouges lumbers alongside a morbidly obese female cadaver, half nude, her fat rolls dangling over her genitals, her milky eyes buried in a face as lumpy as stale dough.
Bringing up the rear, a haphazard assortment of dead carnies, freaks, and contortionists follow stupidly. Encephalitic pinheads, their tiny mouths snapping, stumble along beside ragged trapeze artists in garish sequins and gangrenous faces, followed by multiple amputees trundling along spasmodically. The pack moves in fits and starts, as feral and hungry as a school of piranhas.
Josh lurches away, vaulting across the dry creek bed in a single leap.
He scuttles up the opposite bank and plunges into the neighboring woods with the shotgun over his shoulder. There is no time to reload another shell. He can see Lilly in the distance, sprinting toward the denser trees. He catches up with her in a matter of seconds and directs her to the east.
The two of them vanish into the shadows before what remains of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus even has a chance to stagger across the creek.
* * *
On their way back to the gas station, Josh and Lilly run into a smaller herd of deer. Josh gets lucky and bags one of the juvenile does with a single blast. The booming report echoes up across the sky—far enough from Fortnoy’s to avoid drawing attention, but close enough to lug the trophy back home—and the whitetail goes down gasping and twitching.
Lilly has trouble taking her eyes off the carcass as Josh rigs his belt around its hindquarters and drags the steaming remains nearly half a mile back to Fortnoy’s. In this Plague World, death in any context—human or animal—has taken on new implications.
That night, the mood lightens among the inhabitants of the gas station.
Josh dresses the deer in the back of the service area, in the same galvanized sinks in which they’ve been bathing, and he slaughters enough of the animal to last them weeks. He keeps the excess meat outside, in the deepening cold of the back lot, and he prepares a feast of organ meat, ribs, and belly, slow cooked in the broth of some instant chicken soup that they found in the bottom drawer of Fortnoy’s office desk, along with shavings of wild meadow garlic and nettle stems. They have some canned peaches to accompany the braised deer, and they gorge themselves.
The walkers leave them alone for most of the evening—no sign of the circus dead or any other enclave. Josh notices during dinner that Bob cannot take his eyes off Megan. The older man seems taken with the girl, and for some reason this worries Josh. For days now, Bob has been very cold and brusque toward Scott (not that the kid has noticed anything in his constant state of flakiness). Nevertheless, Josh feels the volatile chemical bonds of their little tribe being tested, stressed, altered.
Later, they sit around the woodstove and smoke Josh’s homemade cigars and share a few ounces of Bob’s whiskey stash. For the first time since leaving the tent city—perhaps since the advent of the plague—they feel almost normal. They talk of escape. They speak of desert islands and antidotes and vaccines and finding happiness and stability again. They reminisce about the things they took for granted before the plague broke out: shopping in grocery stores and playing in parks and going out for dinner and watching TV shows and reading the newspaper on Sunday mornings and going to clubs to hear live music and sitting at Starbucks and shopping at Apple stores and using Wi-Fi and getting mail through that anachronistic thing known as the postal service.
They each have their pet pleasures. Scott bemoans the extinction of good weed, and Megan longs for the days when she could hang out at her favorite bar—Nightlies in Union City—and enjoy the free cucumber shooters and shrimp skewers. Bob pines for ten-year-old bourbon the way a mother might yearn for a lost child. Lilly remembers her guilty pleasures of haunting secondhand stores and thrift shops for the perfect scarf or sweater or blouse—the days when finding cast-off clothing wasn’t a matter of survival. And Josh recalls the number of gourmet food shops he could find in the Little Five Points area of Atlanta—everything from good kimchi to rare pink truffle oil.
Either through some vagary of the wind, or perhaps the combined noise of their laughter—as well as the ticking and rattling of the woodstove—the troubling noises drifting out over the trees from the tent city go unnoticed that night for hours.
At one point—after the little dinner party breaks up and each of them finds their way back to their bedroll on the floor of the service area—Josh thinks he hears something strange echoing under the sound of the breeze tapping against the glass doors. But he simply passes it off as the wind and his imagination.
Josh offers to take the first shift, sitting watch in the front office, so he can make sure the noises are nothing. But hours go by before he hears or sees anything out of the ordinary.
The front office has a large, filthy plate-glass window across its front façade, much of the glass blocked by shelving, racks of maps and travel guides, and little pine deodorizers. The dusty merchandise blocks any sign of trouble rising up and over the distant sea of pines.
The wee hours pass, and eventually Josh dozes off in his chair.
His eyes remain shut until 4:43 A.M., at which point the first faint sound of engines coming up the hill jar him awake with a start.
* * *
Lilly stirs awake to the sound of heavy boot steps pounding through the office doorway. Sitting up against the garage wall, her ass freezing, she doesn’t notice that Bob is already awake in his tangled nest of blankets across the garage.
Sitting up and looking around the service bay, Bob Stookey apparently heard the engine noises mere seconds after they had awakened Josh out in the office. “The hell is going on?” he mumbles. “Sounds like the Indy 500 out there.”
“Everybody up,” Josh says, storming into the garage, frantically looking around the greasy floor, searching for something.
“What’s wrong?” Lilly rubs the sleep from her eyes, her heart starting to thump. “What’s going on?”
Josh comes over to her. He kneels and speaks softly yet urgently. “Something’s going down out there, vehicles moving fast, real reckless and shit—I don’t want to get caught unawares.”
She hears the roar of engines, the pinging of gravel flying. The noises are getting closer. Lilly’s mouth goes dry with panic. “Josh, what are you looking for?”
“Get dressed, babydoll, quick.” Josh glances across the room. “Bob—you see that box of .38 caliber slugs we brought back?”
Bob Stookey torques himself up to a standing position, awkwardly pulling his work trousers over his long underwear, a slice of moonlight coming through the skylight and striping his deeplylined features. “I put it over on the workbench,” he says. “What’s the deal, captain?”
Josh hurries over and grabs the box of ammo. He reaches under his lumberjack coat, pulls the .38 snubbie from his belt, flicks open the cylinder, and loads it while he talks. “Lilly, you go get the lovebirds. Bob, I’m gonna need you to get that pigeon gun of yours and meet me out front.”
“What if they’re friendly, Josh?” Lilly pulls her sweater on, steps into her muddy boots.
“Then we got nothing to worry about.” He whirls back toward the doorway. “Get moving, both of you.” He lurches out of the room.
Heart racing, flesh prickling with terror, Lilly hurries across the garage, charges through the archway, and then down the narrow aisle of the retail store. A single hanging lantern lights her way.