She has a faraway look that Josh Lee Hamilton has seen now and again on the faces of war veterans and emergency room nurses—the gaze of perpetual exhaustion, the haggard look of the shell-shocked, the thousand-yard stare. Josh feels the urge to take her delicate, slender body into his arms and hold her and stroke her hair and make everything all better. But he senses somehow—he knows—now is not the time. Now is the time to listen.
“Do what?” he asks her. Josh sits across from her, also cross-legged, wiping the back of his neck with a damp bandanna. A box of cigars sits on the ground in front of him—the last of his dwindling supply. He is almost hesitant to go through the last of them—a superstitious twinge that he’ll be sealing his fate.
Lilly looks up at him. “When the walkers attack … how do you deal with it without being … scared shitless?”
Josh lets out a weary chuckle. “If you figure that out, you’re gonna have to teach me.”
She stares at him for a moment. “Come on.”
“What?”
“You’re telling me you’re scared shitless when they attack?”
“Damn straight.”
“Oh, please.” She tilts her head incredulously. “You?”
“Let me tell you something, Lilly.” Josh picks up the package of cigars, shakes one loose, and sparks it with his Zippo. He takes a thoughtful puff. “Only the stupid or the crazy ain’t scared these days. You ain’t scared, you ain’t paying attention.”
She looks out beyond the rows of tents lined along the split-rail fence. She lets out a pained sigh. Her narrow face is drawn, ashen. She looks as though she’s trying to articulate thoughts that just stubbornly refuse to cooperate with her vocabulary. At last she says, “I’ve been dealing with this for a while. I’m not … proud of it. I think it’s messed up a lot of things for me.”
Josh looks at her. “What has?”
“The wimp factor.”
“Lilly—”
“No. Listen. I need to say this.” She refuses to look at him, her eyes burning with shame. “Before this … outbreak happened … it was just sort of … inconvenient. I missed out on a few things. I screwed some things up because I’m a chickenshit … but now the stakes are … I don’t know. I could get somebody killed.” She finally manages to look up into the big man’s eyes. “I could totally ruin things for somebody I care about.”
Josh knows what she’s talking about, and it puts the squeeze on his heart. From the moment he laid eyes on Lilly Caul he had felt feelings that he hadn’t felt since he was a teenager back in Greenville—that kind of rapturous fascination a boy can fix upon the curve of a girl’s neck, the smell of her hair, the spray of freckles along the bridge of her nose. Yes, indeed, Josh Lee Hamilton is smitten. But he is not going to screw this relationship up, as he had screwed up so many before Lilly, before the plague, before the world had gotten so goddamn bleak.
Back in Greenville, Josh developed crushes on girls with embarrassing frequency, but he always seemed to muck things up by rushing it. He would behave like a big old puppy licking at their heels. Not this time. This time, Josh was going to play it smart … smart and cautious and one step at a time. He may be a big old dumb-ass hick from South Carolina but he’s not stupid. He’s willing to learn from his past mistakes.
A natural loner, Josh grew up in the 1970s, when South Carolina was still clinging to the ghostly days of Jim Crow, still making futile attempts to integrate their schools and join the twentieth century. Shuffled from one ramshackle housing project to another with his single mom and four sisters, Josh put his God-given size and strength to good use on the gridiron, playing varsity ball for Mallard Creek High School with visions of scholarships in his eyes. But he lacked the one thing that sent players up the academic and socioeconomic ladders: raw aggression.
Josh Lee Hamilton had always been a gentle soul … to a fault. He let far weaker boys pick on him. He deferred to all adults with a “yessim” or “yessir.” He simply had no fight in him. All of which is why his football career eventually petered out in the mid-eighties. That was right around the time his mother, Raylene, got sick. The doctors said it was called “lupus erythematosus,” and it wasn’t terminal, but for Raylene it was a death sentence, a life of chronic pain and skin lesions and near paralysis. Josh took it upon himself to be his mom’s caretaker (while his sisters drifted away to bad marriages and dead-end jobs out of state). Josh cooked and cleaned and took good care of his mama, and within a few years he got good enough at cooking to actually get a job in a restaurant.
He had a natural flair for the culinary, especially cooking meat, and he moved up the ranks at steakhouse kitchens across South Carolina and Georgia. By the 2000s, he had become one of the most sought-after executive chefs in the Southeast, supervising large teams of sous-chefs, catering upscale social events, and getting his picture in Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles. And all the while he managed to run his kitchens with kindness—a rarity in the restaurant world.
Now, amid these daily horrors, beset with all this unrequited love, Josh longed to cook something special for Lilly.
Up until now, they had subsisted on things like canned peas and Spam and dry cereal and powdered milk—none of which would provide the proper backdrop for a romantic dinner or a declaration of love. All the meat and fresh produce in the area had gone the way of the maggots weeks ago. But Josh had designs on a rabbit, or a wild boar that might be roaming the neighboring woods. He would make a ragout, or a nice braise with wild onions and rosemary and some of that Pinot Noir that Bob Stookey had scavenged from that derelict liquor store, and Josh would serve the meat with some herbed polenta, and he would add extra special touches. Some of the ladies in the tent city had been making candles from the suet they found in a bird feeder. That would be nice. Candles, wine, maybe a poached pear from the orchard for dessert, and Josh would be ready. The orchards were still lousy with overripe fruit. Maybe an apple chutney with the pork. Yes. Absolutely. Then Josh would be ready to serve Lilly dinner and tell her how he feels about her, how he wants to be with her and protect her and be her man.
“I know where you’re going with this, Lilly,” Josh finally says to her, tamping his cigar’s ash on a stone. “And I want you to know two things. Number one, there’s no shame in what you did.”
She looks down. “You mean running away like a whipped dog when you were under attack?”
“Listen to me. If the shoe was on the other foot, I would’ve done the same damn thing.”
“That’s bullshit, Josh, I didn’t even—”
“Let me finish.” He snubs out the cigar. “Number two, I wanted you to run. You didn’t hear me. I hollered for you to get the Sam Hell outta there. Makes no sense—only one of them hammers within grasp, both of us trying to mix it up with them things. You understand what I’m saying? You don’t need to feel any shame for what you done.”
Lilly takes a breath. She keeps looking down. A tear forms and rolls down the bridge of her nose. “Josh, I appreciate what you’re trying to—”
“We’re a team, right?” He leans down so he can see her beautiful face. “Right?”
She nods.
“The dynamic duo, right?”
Another nod. “Right.”
“A well-oiled machine.”
“Yeah.” She wipes her face with the back of her hand. “Yeah, okay.”
“So let’s keep it that way.” He throws her his damp bandanna. “Deal?”
She looks at the do-rag in her lap, picks it up, looks at him and manages a grin. “Jesus Christ, Josh, this thing is totally gross.”