The Walking Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

here.”
    She nods.
    Philip gives her a tender smile. He leans down and plants a kiss on her left eyebrow. “Ain’t gonna let nothin’ happen to you.”
    She nods again. She has the little penguin lodged snugly in the crook of her neck. She looks at the stuffed animal and frowns. She moves the penguin to her ear, and she acts as though she’s listening to the animal whisper a secret. She looks up at her father. “Daddy?”
    “Yeah, punkin?”
    “Penguin wants to know somethin’.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Penguin wants to know if them people are sick.”
    Philip takes a deep breath. “You tell Penguin … yeah, they’re sick all right. They’re more than sick. That’s why we’ve been … puttin’ them outta their misery.”
    “Daddy?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Penguin wants to know if we’re gonna get sick, too.”
    Philip strokes the girl’s cheek. “No, ma’am. You tell Penguin we’re gonna stay healthy as mules.”
    This seems to satisfy the girl enough for her to look away and stare into the void some more.
    *   *   *
     
    By four o’clock that morning, another sleepless soul in another part of the house is asking imponderable questions of his own. Lying in a tangle of blankets, his skinny form clad only in T-shirt and briefs, his fever breaking in a film of sweat, Brian Blake stares at the stucco plaster of a dead teenage girl’s ceiling and wonders if this is how the world ends. Was it Rudyard Kipling who said it ends “not with a bang but a whimper.” No, wait a minute … it was Eliot . T. S. Eliot. Brian remembers studying the poem—was it ‘The Hollow Men’?—in his twentieth century comparative literature class at the U of G. A lot of good that degree had done him.
    He lies there and broods about his failures—as he does every night—but tonight the ruminations are intercut with carnage, like frames of a snuff film inserted into his stream of consciousness.
    The old demons stir, mingling with the fresh fears, wearing a groove into his thoughts: Was there something he could have done or said to keep his ex-wife, Jocelyn, from drifting away, from lawyering up like she did, from saying all those hurtful things before she went back to Montego Bay? And can you kill the monsters with a simple blow to the skull or do you have to destroy the brain tissue? Was there something Brian could have done or begged for or borrowed to keep his music shop open in Athens—the only one of its kind in the South, his brilliant fucking idea of a store that catered to hip-hop artists with refurbished turntables and used bass cabinets and gaudy microphones festooned with Snoop Dogg bling? How fast are the unlucky victims out there multiplying? Is it like an airborne plague, or is it passed in the water like Ebola?
    The circular ruminations of his mind keep going back to more immediate matters: the nagging feeling that the seventh member of the family that once lived here is still somewhere in the house.
    Now that Brian has closed the deal among his compatriots that they should indeed stay here indefinitely, he can’t stop worrying about it. He hears every creak, every faint ticking of the foundation settling, every hushed whirr of the furnace coming on. For some reason that he cannot explain, he is absolutely certain that the blond-haired kid is still here, in the house, waiting, biding his time for … what? Maybe the kid is the only one in the family who didn’t turn. Maybe he’s terrified and hiding.
    Before turning in that night, Brian had insisted they check the nooks and crannies of the house one last time. Philip had accompanied him with a pickaxe and a flashlight, and they had checked every corner of the basement, every cabinet, every closet and storage locker. They looked inside the meat freezer in the cellar, and even checked the washer and dryer for unlikely stowaways. Nick and Bobby looked up in the attic, behind trunks, in boxes, in wardrobes. Philip looked under all the beds and behind all