SIXTEEN
The next day, the storm—now a constant bombardment of driving rain and freezing sleet—lashes southeastern Georgia with massive force. Telephone poles buckle under the weight of the onslaught, crashing down on highways choked with abandoned cars. Culverts swell and gush, flooding deserted farms, while the higher elevations are coated with treacherous layers of ice. Eleven miles southeast of Woodbury, in a wooded hollow adjacent to Highway 36, the storm hits the largest public cemetery in the southern United States.
The Edward Nightingale Memorial Gardens and Columbarium lines a mile-long bluff just south of Sprewell State Park, and features tens of thousands of historic markers. The Gothic chapel and visitor center stand at the eastern end of the property, within a stone’s throw of the Woodland Medical Center—one of the state’s largest hospitals. Filled with freshly-turned zombies, abandoned by the staff since the early weeks of the plague, the complex of buildings—including the morgue at Woodland, as well as the enormous labyrinth of funeral parlors underneath the sublevels of Nightingale—teems with reanimated dead, some of them fresh corpses marked for autopsies and burials, others recent DOAs tucked into drawers, all of them trapped, up to this point, in their sealed chambers.
At 4:37 P.M. Eastern Standard Time that Saturday, the nearby Flint River reaches flood levels. In photo-strobe flashes of lightning, the violent currents crash over the banks, razing farms, toppling billboards, and tossing abandoned vehicles across the farm roads like toys scattered by an angry child.
The mudslides start within an hour. The entire northern slope along the borders of the cemetery gives way, sliding toward the Flint on a slimy, brown, mealy wave—ripping graves from the ground, flinging antique caskets across the hill. Coffins break open and spill their ghastly contents into the ocean of mud and sleet and wind. Most of the ragged skeletons break apart like kindling. But many of the non-interred corpses—especially the ones who are still fresh and intact and able to crawl or scrabble—begin slithering toward high, dry land.
Ornate windows along the base of the Nightingale visitor center crack under the pressure of the floodtide, imploding, the gale-force winds doing the rest of the work, tearing sections off Gothic spires and shaving the tops of steeples and decapitating gabled rooftops. A quarter mile to the east, the rushing floodwaters hit the medical center hard, driving debris through weakened entryways and windows.
The zombies trapped inside the morgue pour out of jagged openings, many of them sucked into the currents by the violent wind and air pressure.
By five o’clock that day, a multitude of dead large enough to fill a necropolis—like a vast school of sea creatures washed onto a beach—gets deposited across the neighboring orchards and tobacco fields. They tumble, one over another, on the flood currents, some of them getting caught in trees, others tangling in floating farm implements. Some drift for miles underwater, flailing in the flickering dark with involuntary instinct and inchoate hunger. Thousands of them collect in the moraines and valleys and sheltered areas north of the highway, struggling to climb out of the mud in grotesque pantomimes of primordial man emerging from the Paleolithic soup.
Before the torrential rainstorm has passed—the brunt of it moving on toward the Eastern Seaboard that night—the population of dead now littering the countryside outnumbers the population of living residents, preplague, in the nearby city of Harrington, Georgia—which, according to the sign on Highway 36, totals 4,011 souls.
In the aftermath of this epochal storm, almost a thousand of these wayward corpses begin to coalesce into the largest herd yet witnessed since the advent of the plague. In the rain-swept darkness, the zombies slowly, awkwardly cluster and horde, until a massive throng has formed in the rolling fields between Crest Highway and Roland Road. The herd is so densely packed that from a distance the tops of their putrid heads might be mistaken for a dark, brackish, slow-moving flood tide unfurling across the land.
For no particular reason other than the inexplicable behavior of the dead—be it instinct, scent, pheromones, or random chance—the horde starts churning through the mud in a northwesterly direction, directly toward the closest population center in their path—the town called Woodbury—which lies a little over eight miles away.
* * *
The tail end of the storm leaves the farms and fields of southeastern Georgia inundated with vast, black pools of filthy standing water, the shallow sections turning to black ice, the higher areas seizing up in mud.
The weakening band of freezing rain moves through the area, icing the forests and hills around Woodbury in a glassine wonderland of glittering branches, icicle-festooned power lines, and crystalline paths—all of which would be beautiful in another time and place, another context void of plagues and desperate men.
That next day, the residents of Woodbury struggle to get the town back in working order. The Governor orders his work crews to raid a nearby dairy farm for salt blocks, which are brought back on flatbeds and broken into manageable crumbs with chain saws, then spread across roads and sidewalks. Sandbags are positioned on the south side of town, against the flooded railroad tracks, in an effort to keep the standing waters at bay. All day, under a sky the color of soot, the inhabitants mop and salt and shovel and scrape and shore up flooded nooks and crannies.
“The show must go on, Bob,” the Governor says late that afternoon, standing on the warning apron of the dirt racetrack, the calcium light blazing down through the mists overhead, the thrumming of generators like a dissonant drone of a bassoon orchestra. The air smells of gas fumes, alkali, and burning garbage.
The surface of the track ripples in the wind, a sea of mud as thick as porridge. The rains hit the arena hard, and now the infield shimmers in the stadium lights with two feet of murky standing water. The ice-filmed bleachers are mostly deserted, except for a small crew of workmen who toil with squeegees and shovels.
“Huh?” Bob Stookey sits slumped on a bleacher twenty feet behind the Governor.
Belching absently, his head lolled in a drunken stupor, Bob looks like a lost little boy. An empty bottle of Jim Beam lies on the ice-rimed steel bench next to him, another one—half full—loosely gripped in his greasy, numb hand. He has been drinking steadily for the past five days, ever since he ushered Megan Lafferty out of this world.
An incorrigible drunk can maintain intoxication better than the average person. Most casual drinkers reach their optimum level of drunkenness—that painless, numbed, convivial buzz that gives shy people the strength to socialize—for only fleeting moments before edging over into complete inebriation. Bob, on the other hand, can reach oblivion after about a quart of whiskey and maintain it for days.
But now, this moment, Bob Stookey has reached the twilight of his binge. After drinking a gallon a day, he has begun to regularly nod off, to lose his grip on reality, to hallucinate and black out for hours.
“I said the show must go on,” the Governor says a little louder, coming over to the chain-link fence separating himself and Bob. “These people are getting cabin fever, Bob. They need catharsis.”
“Damn straight,” Bob slurs in a spittle-clogged grunt. He can barely hold his head up. He gazes down through steel waffling at the Governor, who now stands only a couple of feet away, looking balefully up at Bob through the links of the cyclone fence.
In Bob’s feverish gaze, the Governor looks demonic in the cold Lucolux stadium lights, a silver halo appearing around the man’s slicked-back hair with its raven-feather ponytail. His breath comes out in puffs of white vapor, his Fu Manchu mustache twitching at the edges as he expounds, “Little winter storm’s not gonna keep us down, Bob. I got something in mind, gonna blow these people away. You just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”