to Sunday. They actually make a really good looking couple.”
“A couple?” She asked, wondering where he was going with this.
“Oh yes. I first met them in Tennessee. He brought her with him from Atlanta. You’re from Arizona, right? Did he spend a lot of time in Atlanta before the attacks? I’m just asking because they sure seemed familiar and comfortable with each other.” Roach succeeded in putting just the right tone of concern into his voice.
Katie stared back at him, eyes damp. “Yes. Several times a month,” she finally said.
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe I’m wrong, but they sure seem like they’re together. Perhaps he thinks he made an upgrade, but I think he’s foolish. You’re much prettier than she is.”
“He wouldn’t,” Katie said, tears now rolling down her face. “He couldn’t.”
“I’m not saying he did,” Roach said, leaning across the table like he was concerned. “I’m just telling you what I’ve seen. Maybe there’s a perfectly good reason they’re still together after all this time, living in the same house on Tinker.”
Katie looked back at him for a long time, the tears continuing to stream down her face. With a cry, she leapt to her feet and ran to the far side of the room and stood facing the wall, her whole body racked with sobs. Getting slowly to his feet, Roach walked across the room and stood behind her, watching her cry. Finally he stepped in and placed his hands on her shoulders to pull her into an embrace. To hold her perfect form next to his was the only thought on his mind.
The instant Katie felt Roach’s hands on her shoulders she struck. Stepping back she threw a lightning fast elbow into his solar plexus, momentarily paralyzing his diaphragm. Spinning, she batted his arms aside and punched his larynx with bunched fingers, then twisted her hips as she raised her knee into his balls, grabbing the rifle as Roach started to fall to the floor.
The rifle was attached to a sling that was around his shoulders and she had to follow him down to the floor to maintain her grip on the weapon. He tried to struggle with her, but she’d perfectly attacked the three most vulnerable areas on a man and between being unable to breathe and a pair of balls that felt like they had been ruptured, Roach had no strength.
Katie dropped onto him with all her weight, one knee on his throat, the other landing squarely on his bruised solar plexus. What air remained in his lungs whistled out of his mouth.
“Fuck you, asshole!” she hissed in Roach’s face as she quickly disengaged the sling from the rifle, leapt to her feet and took a step back. “You think I don’t know my husband better than that?”
As her thumb found the rifle’s safety she froze at the sound of a shotgun being racked. Looking around she saw half a dozen men watching her, a large, older woman standing only a dozen feet away with a 12 gauge shotgun pointed at her body.
“Why don’t you go ahead and put that gun down, sweetie. There’s no killing round here lessen I say so.” The woman said.
33
Lillian Nosler smiled when her youngest boy told her about the massive casino that was only a couple of miles ahead. She had been on the road with her family for several days, driven out of their home in Arkansas’ Ozark Mountains by herds of infected and suddenly aggressive animals. Razorbacks had killed two of her extended family, one niece and one nephew, late one afternoon. Then during the night female infected had begun arriving, first in small groups, but the volume quickly grew until they had to flee.
Mama, as Lillian was known, led close to sixty people out of the hills that night. In her late sixties she was the Matriarch of her immediate family of seven boys, and being the oldest of a dozen blood and in-law siblings she had taken on the roll as head of the family. Her husband had drunk himself to death twenty years ago leaving Mama to fend for herself and her family.
The Noslers had settled in Arkansas in the mid-1800s, claiming land deep in the Ozarks that wasn’t good for much of anything. It was too remote, rugged and heavily forested for city folks. In the late 1800s Noslers had started working in the mines in the area, extracting lead, and for several generations they lived and died in