Just Another Day at the Office: A Walking Dead Short(14)

“Lilly, there’s something else I wanted to—” He stops and swallows awkwardly.

She lets out a sigh. “Spit it out, Bob.”

“It’s none of my business…all right. I just wanted to say…aw, hell.” He takes a deep breath. “Josh Lee, he’s a good man. I visit with him now and again.”

“Yeah…and?”

“And I’m just saying.”

“Go on.”

“I’m just…look…he ain’t doing too good right about now, all right? He thinks you’re sore at him.”

“He thinks I’m what?”

“He thinks you’re mad at him for some reason, and he ain’t sure why.”

“What did he say?”

Bob gives her a shrug. “It’s none of my beeswax. I ain’t exactly privy to…I don’t know, Lilly. He just wishes you wasn’t ignoring him.”

“I’m not.”

Bob looks at her. “You sure?”

“Bob, I’m telling you—”

“All right, look.” Bob waves his hand nervously. “I ain’t telling you what to do. I just think two people like y’all, good folks, it’s a shame something like this, you know, in these times…” His voice trails off.

Lilly softens. “I appreciate what you’re saying, Bob, I do.”

She looks down.

Bob purses his lips, thinks it over. “I saw him earlier today, over by the log pile, chopping wood like it was going outta style.”



The distance between the loading area and the stack of cordwood measures less than a hundred yards, but crossing it feels like the Bataan Death March to Lilly.

She walks slowly, with her head down, and her hands thrust in the pockets of her jeans to conceal the trembling. She has to weave through a group of women sorting clothes in suitcases, circle around the end of the circus tent, sidestep a group of boys repairing a broken skateboard, and give wide berth to a cluster of men inspecting a row of weapons spread out on a blanket on the ground.

As she passes the men—Chad Bingham included in their number, holding court like a redneck despot—Lilly glances down at the tarnished pistols, eleven of them, different calibers, makes, and models, neatly arrayed like silverware in a drawer. The pair of 12-gauge shotguns from Kmart lie nearby. Only eleven pistols and the shotguns, and a limited number of rounds—the sum total of the settlers’ armory—now standing as a thin tissue of defense between the campers and calamity.

Lilly’s neck crawls with gooseflesh as she passes, the fear burning a hole in her guts. The trembling increases. She feels as though she’s running a fever. The shaking has always been an issue for Lilly Caul. She remembers the time she had to deliver a presentation to the admission committee at Georgia Tech. She had her notes on index cards and had rehearsed for weeks. But when she got up in front of those tenured professors in that stuffy meeting room on North Avenue, she shook so much she dropped the stack of cards all over the floor and completely choked.

She feels that same kind of nervous tension right now—amplified by a factor of a thousand—as she approaches the split-rail fence along the western edge of the property. She feels the trembling in her facial features, and in her hands inside her pockets, so intense now it feels like the tremors are about to seize up her joints and freeze her in place. “Chronic anxiety disorder,” the doctor back in Marietta called it.

In recent weeks, she has experienced this kind of spontaneous palsy in the immediate aftermath of a walker attack—a spell of shuddering that lasts for hours afterward—but now she feels a deeper sense of dread flooding through her that comes from some inchoate, primal place. She is turning inward, facing her own wounded soul, twisted by grief and the loss of her father.

She jumps at the crack of an axe striking timber, her attention yanked toward the fence.

A group of men stand in a cluster around a long row of dry logs. Dead leaves and cottonwood swirl on the wind above the tree line. The air smells of wet earth and matted pine needles. Shadows dance behind the foliage, tweaking Lilly’s fear like a tuning fork in her brain. She remembers nearly getting bitten back in Macon three weeks ago when a zombie lurched out at her from behind a garbage Dumpster. To Lilly, right now, those shadows behind the trees look just like the passageway behind that Dumpster, rotten with menace and the smell of decay and horrible miracles—the dead coming back to life.