The Walking Dead (36 page)

“Oh God.”

“Listen, I know you think this is bullshit, but the way I was brought up, there’s a force in the universe called Good and a force called Evil.”

“Nick, I don’t think this is—”

“Wait. Let me finish. I believe that all this—the plague or whatever you want to call it—is the work of what you would call the Devil or Satan.”

“Nick—”

“Just let me say my piece. I’ve been thinking about it a lot.”

“Go ahead, I’m listening.”

“What’s the thing Satan hates the most? The power of love? Maybe. Somebody being born again. Yeah, probably. But I kinda think it’s when a person passes, and their spirit flies up to Paradise.”

“I’m not following you.”

Nick looks into Brian’s hollow gaze. “That’s what’s going on here, Brian. The Devil’s figured out a way to keep people’s souls trapped here on earth.”

A moment passes as Brian absorbs this. Nick doesn’t expect Brian to believe any of this, but maybe, just maybe, Nick can get him to understand.

In that brief silence, the north wind whistles in the shutters. The weather is turning. The villa creaks and moans. Nick lifts the collar of his mothball-scented sweater—days ago, they found some warm clothes in the villa’s attic—and now he shivers in the frigid air of the second floor. “What your brother’s doing is wrong, it’s against God,” Nick says then, and the statement hangs in the gloom.

*   *   *

At that moment, out in the darkness of the orchard, a small campfire crackles and flickers on the ground. Philip sits on the cold earth in front of the fire, his shotgun next to him, a musty little book he found in the villa’s nursery open on his lap. “‘Let me in, Let me in, Little Pig,’” Philip reads aloud in a stiff, labored singsong voice. “‘Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and blow your house in!’”

Three feet away, tied to the tree trunk, Penny Blake snarls and drools at every word, her tiny jaws snapping impotently.

“‘Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin,’” Philip recites, turning a delicate page of onionskin. He pauses and glances up at the thing that used to be his daughter.

In the flicker of firelight, Penny’s small face contorts with unyielding hunger, as wrinkled and bloated as a jack-o’-lantern. Her midsection, wound with baling wire, strains against the tree. She reaches out with curled, clawlike fingers and clutches at the air—yearning to break free and make a meal of her father.

“‘But of course,’” Philip continues, his voice breaking, “‘the wolf
did
blow the house in.’” An agonizing pause before Philip says in a shattered voice, filled with equal parts sorrow and madness, “‘And he ate the pig.’”

*   *   *

Over the remainder of that week, sleep does not come easily for Philip Blake. He tries to get a few hours each night but the nervous energy keeps him tossing and turning until he has to get up and do something. Most nights, he goes out to the barn and works off some of his rage on Sonny and Cher. They are the ostensible reasons Penny has turned, and it is up to Philip to make sure they suffer like no man or woman has ever suffered. The delicate process of keeping them just this side of death is not easy. Every once in a while, Philip has to give them water to make sure they don’t die on him. He also has to be careful they don’t kill themselves in order to escape their torments. Like a good jailer, Philip keeps the ropes tight, and all sharp objects out of their grasp.

On
this
night—Philip thinks it’s a Friday—he waits until Nick and Brian are asleep before he slips out of his room, pulls on his denim jacket and boots, and makes his way out the back door and across the moonlit grounds to the weather-beaten barn on the northeast corner of the property. He likes to announce himself as he arrives.

“Daddy’s home,” he murmurs in a convivial tone, his breath showing in puffs of vapor as he pulls the padlock and pushes open the double doors.

He flips on a battery-powered lantern.

Sonny and Cher are slumped in the shadows where he left them, two ragged creatures trussed up like suckling pigs, side by side, sitting in a spreading pool of their own blood, piss, and shit. Sonny is barely awake, his head lolled to one side, his heavy-lidded junkie eyes rimmed in red. Cher is unconscious. She lies next to him, her leather pants still down around her ankles.

Each of them bear the festering marks of Philip’s tools of punishment—needle-nosed pliers, barbed wire, two-by-fours with exposed rusty nails, and various blunt objects that occur to Philip in the heat of the moment.

“Wake up, sis!” Philip reaches down and flips the woman onto her back, the restraints cutting into her wrists, the rope around her neck keeping her from squirming too much. He slaps her. Her eyes flutter. Philip slaps her again. She comes awake now, the muffled cries dampened by the hank of duct tape over her mouth.

At some point in the night, she managed to pull her bloody panties back up and over her privates.

“Let me once again remind you,” Philip says, yanking her panties back down to her knees. He stands over her, wrenching her legs apart with his boots as though clearing a path for himself. She writhes and wriggles below him as if she might be able to squirm out of her own skin. “Y’all are the ones took my daughter from me—so we’re all gonna go to hell together.”

Philip unbuckles his belt, and drops his pants, and it doesn’t require much imagination for him to instantly produce an erection—his rage and hate burn so warmly in his solar plexus, it feels like a battering ram. He drops to his knees between the woman’s trembling legs.

The first thrust is always the trigger—the voice in his brain abruptly chiming out, taunting him, urging him on with fragments of old biblical nonsense that his daddy used to mumble while drunk:
Vengeance is mine, vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord!

But tonight, after the third or fourth thrust into the limp woman, Philip stops.

A combination of things steals his focus, hooks his attention. He hears footsteps outside, crunching across the rear of the property, and he even sees, through the slatted siding, the shadow of a figure blurring past the barn. But what gets Philip to draw back and stand up, and hurriedly pull his pants back on, is the fact that this figure is moving toward the orchard.

Toward the place where Penny resides.

*   *   *

Philip exits the barn and instantly sees a figure plunging into the shadows of the orchard. The figure is a compact, trim man in his thirties clad in a sweater and jeans, carrying a huge rusty spade over his shoulder.

“Nick!”

Philip’s warning cry goes unheeded. Nick has already vanished into the trees.

Drawing the nine-millimeter from behind his belt, Philip charges toward the orchard. He snaps a round into the chamber as he plunges into the woods. Darkness gives way to the beam of a flashlight.

Fifty feet away, Nick Parsons is shining a light on the livid face of the Penny-thing.

“NICK!”

Nick whirls suddenly with the shovel raised, and the flashlight tumbles out of his hand. “It’s gone too far, Philly, it’s gone too far.”

“Put the shovel down,” Philip says as he approaches with the gun raised. The flashlight beam shines up into the leaves, casting an eerie, pale glow over everything, like a grainy black-and-white film.

“You can’t do this to your daughter, you don’t realize what you’re doing.”

“Put it down.”

“You’re keeping her soul from entering heaven, Philly.”

“Shut up!”

Twenty feet away, the Penny-thing yanks on its bonds in the shadows. The cockeyed beam of the flashlight highlights her monstrous features from below. Her eyes reflect the dry silver light.

“Philly, listen to me.” Nick lowers the shovel, his voice unsteady with emotion. “You have to let her die … she’s one of God’s children. Please … I’m begging you as a Christian … please let her go.”

Philip aims the Glock directly at Nick’s forehead. “If she dies … you die next.”

For a moment, Nick Parsons looks crestfallen, absolutely beaten.

Then he drops the shovel, hangs his head, and walks back toward the villa.

Throughout all this, the Penny-thing keeps its sharklike gaze on the man it once called father.

*   *   *

Brian continues to heal. Six days after the beating, he feels strong enough to get out of bed and limp around the house. His hip twinges with every step, and the dizziness comes in waves whenever he goes up and down the stairs, but on the whole, he’s doing pretty well. His bruises have faded and the swelling has gone down, and he feels his appetite returning. He also has a good talk with Philip.

“I miss her something fierce,” Brian says to his brother late one night in the kitchen, each man suffering from severe insomnia. “I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat if it meant bringing her back.”

Philip looks down. He has developed a series of very subtle tics, which emerge when he’s under pressure—sniffing, pursing his lips, clearing his throat. “I know, sport. It ain’t your fault … what happened out there. I never should have done that to you.”

Brian’s eyes moisten. “I probably would have done the same thing.”

“Let’s put it behind us.”

“Sure.” Brian wipes his eyes. He looks at Philip. “So, what’s the deal with the people in the barn?”

Philip looks up. “What about ’em?”

“The whole thing has Nick on edge … and you can hear things out there … at night, I’m talking about. Nick thinks you’re, like … pulling their fingernails off.”

A cold smile twitches at the corner of Philip’s mouth. “That’s sick.”

Brian isn’t smiling. “Philip, whatever you’re doing out there, it’s not going to bring Penny back.”

Philip looks down again. “I know that … don’t you think I know that?”

“Then I’m begging you to stop. Whatever it is you’re doing …
stop.
” Brian looks at his brother. “It’s not serving any purpose.”

Philip looks up with embers of emotion in his eyes. “That trash out there in the barn stole everything that mattered to me … that bald motherfucker and his crew … them two junkies … they destroyed the life of a beautiful innocent little girl and they did it outta sheer meanness and greed. Ain’t nothing I could do to them would suffice.”

Brian sighs. Further protest seems futile, so he simply stares at his coffee.

“And you’re wrong about it not serving any purpose,” Philip concludes, after a moment of thought. “It serves the purpose of making me feel better.”

*   *   *

The next night, after the lanterns go out, and the fires in the three separate fireplaces dwindle down to coals, and the northeasterly wind begins toying with the dormers and loose shingles, Brian is lying in bed in the sewing room, trying to lull himself into a troubled sleep, when he hears the door latch click and sees the silhouette of Nick Parsons slipping into his room. Brian sits up. “What’s going on?”

“Sssshhh,” Nick whispers, coming across the room and kneeling by the bed. Nick has his coat on, his gloves, and a bulge on his hip that looks like the grip of a handgun. “Keep it down.”

“What is it?”

“Your brother’s asleep … finally.”

“So what?”

“So we gotta do a—whaddaya callit—an intervention.”

“What are you talking about? Penny? You’re talking about trying to take Penny out again?”

“No! The barn, man! The barn!”

Brian moves to the edge of the bed and rubs his eyes, stretches his sore limbs, shakes the cobwebs off. “I don’t know if I’m ready for this.”

*   *   *

They slip out the back, each one of them armed with a handgun. Nick has the bald man’s .357 steel-plated revolver, Brian has a snub-nose that belonged to one of the thug gunmen. They steal across the property to the barn, and Brian shines a flashlight on the padlock. They find a piece of timber in a woodpile, and they use it to pry open the rotted doors, making as little noise as possible.

Brian’s heart hammers in his chest as they slip inside the dark barn.

The stench of mold and urine fills their senses as they work their way back through the fetid shadows to the rear of the barn, where two dark heaps lie on the floor in puddles of blood as black as oil. At first, the shapes don’t even look human, but when the beam of Brian’s flashlight falls on a pale face, Brian lets out a gasp.

“Holy fucking shit.”

The man and woman are still alive, barely, their faces disfigured and swollen, their midsections exposed like raw meat. A thin tendril of steam rises from festering, sucking wounds. Both captives are semiconscious, their parboiled eyes fixed on the rafters. The woman is brutalized, a broken doll with legs akimbo and blood patterns covering her pasty, tattooed flesh.

Brian begins to tremble. “Holy shit … what have we…? Holy
fucking shit
…”

Nick kneels by the woman. “Brian, get some water.”

“What about—”

“Get it from the well! Hurry!”

Brian hands over his flashlight, spins, and hustles back the way he came.