Chapter 55 - He's Still a Kid
Fear filled the boy's eyes. In them, reflected like mirrors, were the faces of Hanks and Kenny staring back down at him.
Kenny saw it — the flash of killing intent in Hanks's eyes — and his gut clenched. He looked at the boy's young face, still soft with the last traces of childhood, and couldn't stop himself. He reached out and grabbed Hanks's arm.
"Hanks. Don't." His voice dropped to barely above a breath. "He's still a kid."
"He didn't come at us. We got what we needed. Just knock him out, tie him up, and leave him. That's all we have to do."
"There's no reason to kill him."
Hanks went still. He turned his head and looked at Kenny, measuring the risk in silence.
"Kenny," he said quietly, "in this world, without enough strength to back it up, playing it soft gets you killed. Mercy has a price tag."
Kenny held his gaze even as his skin crawled under it. He kept his voice low and steady.
"We're not..." He paused, then pressed again. "We're not like them. Are we?" A beat. "Officer."
He put the slightest weight on that last word.
The alley sat completely silent around them. The only sound was the boy's ragged, suppressed breathing — the desperate rhythm of someone trying very hard not to make a noise.
Hanks's eyes moved back and forth between Kenny's tense face and the boy's ashen one. Once. Twice. A third time.
Finally, the cold intent in his gaze faded — not warming, exactly, but receding.
He raised his hand and brought the butt of the tactical knife down hard on the back of the boy's neck.
The boy let out a muffled grunt. His eyes rolled back and he folded, going limp against the ground.
"Drag him into a corner and keep him out of sight." Hanks sheathed the knife. His voice was perfectly level, as though that flash of a moment had never happened at all.
They weren't exactly in the business of taking prisoners. There was no rope anywhere nearby either. If he wasn't going to finish it, the next best option was gag him and stash him somewhere out of the way.
Kenny exhaled a long, slow breath, then picked through the nearby trash pile until he found a strip of filthy cloth. He didn't waste time thinking about what was crusted on it — just wadded it up and pushed it into the unconscious boy's mouth.
"Ugh." He shook his hand out afterward, grimacing.
"Move. Post office." Hanks was already on his feet. Before he stepped away, he glanced once more at the boy tucked into the shadows of the corner.
His expression was unreadable.
Surviving at all isn't easy. Maybe I—
He cut the thought off before it could form completely and turned east, following the route the boy had described.
Kenny fell in behind him without a word.
They worked their way toward the post office. Walkers began appearing in ones and twos — drifting along the broken street, shambling through the doorways of gutted storefronts.
Then Hanks noticed something wrong.
Walkers rotted. That was the nature of them — they softened and fell apart over time, becoming slower, more brittle, less dangerous as weeks turned to months. But these ones didn't look like that. They moved with a disturbing vitality, their bodies intact and fluid except for whatever wounds had killed them. Strip away the obvious decay and they looked almost like living people.
One or two fresh turns would be unremarkable. But every single walker they'd passed looked this way.
Something had changed.
Hanks thought about the blood moon. That frenzy, that enhanced speed and strength — had it left something behind? Some kind of permanent alteration?
A walker nearby pulled his attention back to the ground level. He reached down and drew the tactical knife from his thigh holster with a quiet rasp, then signaled Kenny with a small hand gesture.
Kenny understood. He crouched beside a drainage gutter at the edge of the road, resting his shotgun across the concrete lip, shifting the barrel in slow arcs. He'd monitor a wider field of view — watching especially for any living patrol that might come through.
Hanks pressed himself against the wall of a building where the plaster had crumbled in long, irregular strips. One walker stood with its back to him, mindlessly clawing at the door of a parked sedan, its fingers dragging across the metal over and over in a slow, purposeless loop.
He moved without sound. Left hand shot out and clamped down on the top of the walker's skull. Right hand drove the knife into the base of the skull in one clean strike.
The body went rigid for half a second, then folded. It made almost no noise hitting the ground.
Hanks caught it before it could fall, lowered it to the asphalt, then eased it into the shadow of the wall. The whole sequence took under five seconds.
He pressed forward, using doorways and wrecked vehicles and overgrown planter boxes as cover, working his way through the stragglers the same way — quiet approach, control the head, one clean strike, move the body into shadow, keep moving.
Kenny watched from his position with his heart somewhere in his throat and a cold sweat on his palms. He was terrified of making a mistake on overwatch. But he couldn't take his eyes off what Hanks was doing, either. The man moved like the alley was his to own — efficient and cold and absolutely precise, not a single motion wasted. It was almost like watching a performance. The kind that reminded you exactly what you were looking at.
Hanks stopped at a street corner. He eased his head around the edge of the building and looked.
Across the street stood their target.
It was a low, modest building with a green slanted roof. A wooden sign hung above the entrance. The post office.
But the front entrance and the adjacent stretch of street held at least seven or eight walkers, wandering slow and directionless in the open space between here and the door.
Hanks signaled Kenny to hold position.
He used the overgrown weeds pushing through the cracked sidewalk for cover, moving in low and slow toward the nearest walker, letting the scrub brush conceal his outline.
Each time he slipped out of shadow, the knife went in clean — rear skull or eye socket — and then the body was being dragged quietly into hiding before the next one had time to react. Over the next few minutes he worked through the walkers in front of the post office one by one, methodically, until the entrance and the surrounding street had gone still.
He motioned to Kenny.
Kenny straightened into a low run, crossed the street in a crouch, and met Hanks at the entrance. They slipped inside together.
The interior was dim. The air carried the smell of dust and mildewed paper and something faintly organic underneath it all. The lobby was a wreck — chairs and tables overturned, envelopes and parcels strewn across the floor in drifts. Behind the service counter, a body in a mail carrier's uniform lay face-down on the floor, long past turning.
Hanks gestured and they split up to search.
Kenny moved carefully toward the side corridor with his shotgun raised, watching the office doorways. Hanks worked the main room, following the overhead signs to the back areas.
Most of what he turned up on the shelving was useless — outdated routing forms, blank envelopes, paperwork that meant nothing now. He pulled open desk drawers one after another until he found a folded stack of maps still sealed in a plastic sleeve.
Georgia state highway map. Several larger-scale sheets covering Creekwood and the surrounding area.
"Got it," he said in a low voice, pulling the plastic apart and rolling the maps into a tight cylinder before sliding them into his pack.
Then something crashed on the other side of the room.
A door marked BREAK ROOM swung open and slammed against the wall. Two walkers in post office uniforms lurched out, stumbling over each other in their rush toward the nearest living thing — which happened to be Kenny.
Kenny's finger found the trigger on reflex.
The boom of the shotgun in that enclosed space was enormous, hammering off every wall at once. The first walker took the blast full in the chest and went airborne, flying back into the second and sending them both sprawling.
But the sound rolled out through the building and through the walls and into the street like a thunderclap. Every walker within earshot just got a dinner bell.
"Damn it." Kenny muttered it under his breath.
Hanks was already moving. He stepped up to the walker still thrashing on the floor and put one P226 round through its head.
The second shot echoed off the lobby walls.
"Go. Now." He grabbed Kenny's sleeve and pulled him toward the door at a run.
But outside, the street had already changed.
It was already too late.