Chapter 2: Dead City
[Downtown Atlanta — Late October 2010, Midday]
Three blocks in, and I knew the show had lied to me.
Not about the big things. Walkers were real—I could hear them groaning in the cross streets, see their silhouettes lurching behind storefront windows. Atlanta was dead, the buildings standing like headstones over a city-sized grave. All that tracked.
But the geography was wrong. The street layout I'd assembled from aerial shots and establishing sequences was a television version of Atlanta, simplified for narrative convenience. Real Atlanta had one-way streets that fed into tangles of overpasses. Intersections that didn't exist on screen. Alleys that dead-ended where the show implied throughways.
I'd been navigating by memory of fiction, and fiction had gaps.
The alley I chose off Peachtree looked clear for its first fifty yards. Dumpsters lined the left side, back doors of restaurants and dry cleaners on the right, most hanging open. A breeze carried the sweet-rot stink of garbage that had been cooking in Georgia heat for weeks.
The cold hit me mid-stride.
Different from the office building. Sharper. It started at the base of my skull and radiated outward, tingling through my shoulders and down both arms. My legs stopped before my brain gave the order, like the signal bypassed conscious thought entirely.
I pressed sideways into the shadow of a dumpster and waited.
Three walkers spilled from a doorway forty feet ahead. Two men and a woman, all in business attire—ties loosened, blouse torn, one missing a shoe. They'd been office workers once. The closest one's jaw hung at an angle that said the hinge was broken, and a sound like wet gravel came from its open mouth.
If I'd kept walking, I'd have been on top of them before I could react. Ten feet of distance between me and the point where the alley would have funneled me right into their path.
The cold faded in stages as the walkers shuffled past the alley mouth and continued down the street, drawn by something—sound, maybe, or just the aimless migration patterns of things with nowhere to be.
I let thirty seconds pass after the sensation fully cleared, then moved.
Twice now. The warning had fired twice, and both times it had been accurate. Phase One, if I was mapping this against what I understood—unreliable, short-range, only triggering for immediate threats. Sixty percent activation rate, according to some internal metric I couldn't access but suspected existed. The fact that it had worked both times was either lucky or the threat level had been high enough to guarantee a trigger.
I couldn't count on it. Not yet. But I could listen for it.
---
[Midtown Atlanta — Early Afternoon]
The wrong turn came twenty minutes later.
I'd been cutting south through side streets, avoiding the main arteries where walkers congregated in loose clusters. My mental map said a service road should connect behind a row of warehouses and spit me out near the railroad tracks that ran toward the quarry.
Instead, I found a chain-link fence topped with razor wire, and beyond it a concrete retaining wall fifteen feet high. The service road existed, but it had been blocked by a jackknifed delivery truck at some point during the evacuation. The truck's cab was crushed against the wall. No way through.
I turned around.
The mouth of the street behind me had walkers in it.
Four of them, maybe five—hard to count when they were bunched together and backlit by afternoon sun. They hadn't seen me yet. They were milling, drifting, but their general trajectory would bring them into this dead-end within a minute.
My pulse spiked. The cold didn't come—you already know about the danger, idiot—and I scanned the alley walls for options. Solid brick on both sides. No doors, no windows at ground level. But there—twenty feet up, a fire escape ladder, the bottom section retracted and locked in its raised position.
I ran. Quiet as I could on asphalt, which wasn't quiet enough. Behind me, the milling turned to moaning, and the moaning meant they'd spotted me.
The fire escape's bottom rung was eight feet off the ground. I jumped, caught it, and my palms screamed—the metal was rusty and flaked under my grip, edges biting into the scrapes I'd gotten crawling around the office building. I hung there, feet dangling, arms burning.
The ladder didn't budge. The release mechanism was jammed with rust and grime.
Below me, the first walker reached the base of the building. Its fingers swiped the air six inches below my shoes. I pulled my knees to my chest. The dead hand closed on nothing.
I hauled upward. The pipe, shoved through my belt, dug into my hip with every movement. My arms shook. Glenn's body was lighter than my old one, leaner, and I used that—kicked off the brick wall, got one elbow over the rung above, then the other, and dragged myself up onto the ladder's platform.
The release mechanism let go under my weight with a shriek of corroded metal, and the bottom section slammed down. The walker below reached for the lowest rung, got its fingers around it, and tried to climb.
It couldn't. The coordination wasn't there. It hung, moaning, pulling itself nowhere, while three more gathered below it and pawed at the bricks.
I climbed. My palms left smears of blood on every rung. At the third-floor landing I found a window already broken—shattered inward, glass on the carpet inside—and rolled through it into what had been somebody's apartment. The walkers below kept groaning, but the sound faded as I moved deeper inside, found the door to the building's internal stairwell, and climbed to the roof.
Atlanta spread out below me.
---
[Rooftop — Late Afternoon]
The skyline was a monument to absence. No car horns. No jackhammers. No bass leaking from a club at two in the afternoon because somebody had decided the party started early. Just wind, and the faint thread of groaning that never fully stopped, like the city was breathing through rotted lungs.
My hands trembled against the rooftop ledge.
Not from the climb. Not from the walkers. From everything. The accumulated weight of waking up in a dead man's body in a dead world, with dead things shuffling through streets I was supposed to know but didn't. The adrenaline was leaving, and what it left behind was a twenty-four-year-old pizza driver who'd been alive for six hours in a body that wasn't his, staring at a skyline he'd only seen through a screen.
I sat down. Let my legs dangle over the ledge. Opened one of the warm Coca-Colas and drank it in small sips.
Two minutes. I gave myself two minutes to be afraid.
The fear came up hot and formless, and I let it sit in my chest without fighting it. Homesickness for a world that had killed me. Grief for a body I'd never see in a mirror again. The absurd cosmic joke of surviving a truck accident by dying and waking up in a zombie apocalypse.
Two minutes passed. I stood up.
Work the problem.
To the northwest, past the tangle of downtown, thin smoke rose against the sky. Faint, the kind you'd miss if you weren't looking for it—a campfire, not a wildfire. Too controlled, too steady. The quarry camp. Shane's group. My destination.
I traced the route with my eyes. The railroad tracks ran south-southwest out of the city, and from there I could follow the tree line to the quarry access road. Eight miles, maybe nine. Doable before dark if I moved smart.
Below, closer, something else caught my attention. A tank. Military, parked in the middle of a broad intersection, its turret askew. I stared at it and a memory surfaced with unnatural precision—not remembered the way I normally remembered things, where details blurred and softened with time. This memory arrived sharp, complete, high-definition. Rick Grimes climbing out of that tank. Glenn's voice on the radio. Hey, you. Dumbass.
My memory was doing something it hadn't done before. I could see the scene from the show like I'd watched it five minutes ago. Every detail. The angle of light. The sound mix. Steven Yeun's voice performance in that first line.
I blinked and the clarity held. This was new. This wasn't how I remembered things in my old life—my old life, where I forgot people's names at parties and couldn't recall what I'd eaten for lunch two days ago. This memory was locked. Pristine.
Another gift, maybe. Another tool in whatever toolkit had come packaged with this second chance.
I catalogued it the way I'd catalogued the danger sense: Useful. Unreliable. Test further.
The tank would be Rick's trap and his salvation. I memorized its position against the street grid, then turned my attention to the route out. There—a sporting goods store two blocks south. The windows were smashed but I could see shelves inside, partially looted. Might have a backpack, a knife, something worth carrying. And beyond that, the overpass that would get me past the densest cluster of walkers on the southern approach.
I mapped it, noting every landmark, every potential choke point. The rooftop gave me the gift of perspective—I could see where walkers clustered thickest, which streets had clear sightlines, where abandoned vehicles created barriers that funneled the dead into predictable channels.
The sun had shifted west. Long shadows stretched across the rooftops. Dusk would come in two hours, and walkers were harder to spot in low light but also harder to provoke—less visual stimulation, less wandering.
I'd move at dusk. Stick to the railroad tracks. Reach the quarry by full dark and approach the camp at dawn, when sentries would be tired and less likely to shoot first.
My palms stung. I looked down at the scrapes—raw, bleeding sluggishly, embedded with rust flakes from the fire escape. I wiped them on my pants and noticed something. The scrapes from this morning—the ones from crawling around the office building—had scabbed over already. Fast. Faster than they should have.
I pressed a thumbnail against one of the older scrapes. The scab held firm, the skin around it pink and tight. Eight hours and already halfway healed.
Three gifts, then. A warning sense. A memory that worked like a hard drive. And a body that stitched itself back together quicker than it had any right to.
None of them made me bulletproof. None of them made me strong. But in a world where a scraped palm could go septic and kill you, where remembering which road was safe could mean the difference between life and a shuffling afterlife, where a two-second warning was the margin between a close call and a bite—
They were enough. They had to be.
The shadows grew longer. I waited, watching the dead mill through streets that had once held half a million living people.
When the light turned amber and the shapes below became harder to distinguish from the cars and the debris and the long shadows of buildings, I climbed back down.
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