There was a short but very awkward pause, and then Julia felt the tension in her muscles unwind.
"Sorry," she said, tripping over her voice a little as she spoke. "I thought you were Philip."
Hoffman grunted softly, but this flat, non-committal sound, coupled with the fact that that his scars made his expression almost impossible to interpret with any degree of accuracy, rendered him an eerily blank slate. She glanced off to the side as she heard a muted noise in the distance, but it was only routine activity from the guard change at the barracks, almost two hundred yards to the south of them and the focus of what might very well have been the only artificial light in the whole state; were it not for this small oasis of sound and sight, she thought, she and the detective could well have been the only two people on earth.
Julia surfaced from this drawn-out thought to see that Hoffman was still regarding her indifferently, hands hanging loose at his sides. It was the casual nature of this silent appraisal that quickly began to prick at her, so she spoke up once more solely in order to put words between them.
"Andrea was just telling me –"
"I can guess what she said, thanks," Hoffman told her, abruptly. "That's not why I came out here. I'm going to take a look around the town."
Her jaw sagged a little. Within the confines of the base, surrounded on all sides as it was by steel chain link fence and patrolled by heavily armed soldiers, there was little to fear any more. Beyond that outpost of civilisation, however, Winslow lay in ruins for the most part, and where it wasn't crawling with walkers, there were feral dogs to take into consideration as well and some had been known to attack. Going there even in broad daylight was risky; the desert night had fallen quickly, however, and Hoffman's suggestion seemed to her to be little short of suicidal.
"You're totally crazy," she said, neatly summing up this thought process. She'd not meant to speak so bluntly and especially not to someone as ill-tempered as the detective, but at the same time, she was hard put to think of a gentler response. If he was struck by her statement, however, he didn't show it, and it occurred to Julia that it probably wasn't the first time he'd heard it said.
"I don't think the guards are gonna let you out the gate," she added, but half-heartedly, in the face of the decidedly calculating smile that was now surfacing on his face.
"Who said I was using the gate?" he asked, and then simply set his shoulders and walked past her, heading for the fence on the other side of the runway. Beyond that, she knew, lay the old US Route 66 and, past that, the outskirts of the town. None of this was visible in the darkness, however, and Julia's heart skipped a little in her chest as she watched Hoffman reach the fence and spring, catching his fingers in the steel links and scaling it with insolent ease. Once he'd done so, however, he paused, craning his neck and looking down at her with a challenging gleam in his eye as the breeze drew a lick of hair across his cheek.
"Coming?" he asked, and then, without waiting for a response, simply dropped off the top of the fence and disappeared into the gloom on the far side. She heard him pushing his way through the shoulder-high brush for a moment, and then the soft crackle of leaves died away entirely. Julia released her breath all at once and turned back to look at the terminal. There was nobody else in sight, and aside from the dull glow of the candlelight through the milky windows, there was nothing to indicate the slightest sign of life. She swung back again, eyed the fence for a second and then reaching a decision that suddenly owed precious little to a conscious appraisal of the risks involved, jogged over to the fence and started climbing.
Hoffman hadn't gone far, and didn't seem to be in any hurry, as Julia found him crossing the railway tracks without looking around him. His stride faltered a little as he heard her coming up behind him, but that was the only response he issued until she finally drew level, at which point he reached into his pocket and extracted a jack-knife. He prised the blade out with a click and handed it to her without a word. She took it automatically, and then frowned, matching step with him as best she could.
"What's this for?"
"How the fuck did you survive this long?" he said, contemptuously. "There's gonna be walkers out there. What were you planning to do – talk them to death?"
Julia felt her temper stir like a snake, but merely closed her fingers tight on the handle of the knife instead as she reconsidered her intended outburst.
"I know that," she said, deliberately. "But if it's so dangerous, why are you going?"
"I'm bored and I'm pissed off," he told her, without looking around. "In my case, that's a bad combination, so if you wanna know why I'm going looking for trouble, it's because I enjoy it. Simple as that."
"What's got you so pissed off?" she went on, knowing that this was a thread at which she shouldn't be pulling, but her curiosity about the man was by now scaling previously unexpected heights and she found herself quite powerless to rein it in.
"People keep asking me dumb questions," said Hoffman. Julia glanced up at his face, but it was too dark to see his expression. There had been the softest note of amused sarcasm in his voice; not much, but enough to tell her that she wasn't going to get any further with her queries, at least not for the moment.
The detective had been moving quietly but quickly, but now he pulled up sharp and waved a hand in the air to force silence on Julia, too. She halted both her feet and her mouth at once and then, acting on a sudden instinct for self-preservation, inched into Hoffman's shadow. After a few seconds, though, she craned her neck around him and took in the scene in front of them.
They were standing at a wide intersection downtown, and though most of the buildings on both sides of the street were now nothing more than piles of glass and bricks, some had managed to remain standing against the onslaught of the firestorm that had ripped the town apart. These lent plenty of deep shadows to an otherwise open, moonlit panorama, but even as hard as she strained to listen, Julia could hear nothing.
"What's the problem?" she hissed.
"Quiet," muttered Hoffman, and then slipped away from her, sliding into the narrow space between two buildings. Julia started after him, almost stumbling over her own feet in sudden confusion, but he simply raised his palm in her direction, indicating that she should stay put, before melting into the shadow entirely.
Perhaps ten seconds passed, during which she heard nothing more besides the distant yip-yip of a coyote, and then, a low scrape and shuffle, barely audible even in the grip of a silence so thick she could feel it close on her ears like cheesecloth. Then, in the monochrome stretch of the road ahead, a narrow shape detached itself from the irregular angle of shadow cast by a burned-out SUV and inched its way towards her, sidling left or right now and then but ultimately keeping its course. Julia's knuckles whitened in fright, and it was only this that reminded her that she was still clutching the knife Hoffman had given her. She raised it a little, but her hand was shaking badly now and she lowered her arm once more and, instead, tottered back a few steps.
The walker was no more than ten paces from her now, and she let loose a soft squeal of horror as she saw that its lower abdomen was torn open and most of its viscera were either damaged or missing, revealing a glimpse of yellow vertebrae at the back of the dry, hollow cavity in its guts.
By the time Julia had managed to drag her gaze back up to the creature's face and meet its rheumy eyes, it was reaching for her with fingers that were no more than brittle bone cloaked in equally frail skin, and she shied away, but then the creature stayed the inexorable advance of its hand and, broadcasting something like puzzlement, swung its head to the right.
It met the blade of Hoffman's ice pick coming the other way, and Julia staggered back with a shrill, airless gasp as the detective clamped his hand on the back of the thing's neck and drove the weapon even further into its eye socket, increasing the angle until he heard the point of the blade tear through the roof of the orbit with a dull crack and, finally, spear the walker's brain. He seemed content to wait for his victim to stop twitching before he released his hold and withdrew the ice pick but, as soon as he had done so, the skeletal form crumpled at once, its fine-haired skull knocking on the road as it fell.
Julia felt tears on her cheek and the point of her chin even though she'd been unaware of their advent, and she wiped these away with the back of her hand before Hoffman turned to face her, not wanting him to see that particular indignity even though she had no such control over the quiver in her legs or the near-hysterical catch in her breath, both of which must have been just as telling.
"You..." she began, but the word emerged as a raw croak and she coughed and tried again. "You used me as bait?"
"A diversion," said Hoffman, with a disinterested shrug, as he wiped the blade on the hem of his coat before stowing it in a pocket. "Get over it. You could have killed it yourself, anyway."
"But I never –" she began, and then bit back the rest of that sentence, but far too late. The truth was already reflected in the detective's face.
"You never killed a walker before. That figures," he added, scathingly, his lip curling slightly. "Now why don't you do us both a favour and haul your pampered little Valley Girl ass back to the base before the padre wonders where you are. It's way past your bedtime."
He turned on his heel before Julia could even react, let alone respond, and vanished into the shadows once more.
"How did you cope with a baby in all this?"
Diana hadn't intended to ask that particular question at all, and she was aware that she'd probably phrased it badly, notwithstanding that there probably was no tactful way to put it. However, she'd long since run out of less awkward topics of conversation and was by now simply trying to avoid discussing her own recent history, which would only lead to even more difficult questions, this time aimed at her.
If she was bothered by the clumsy query, though, Andrea didn't display any sign of such; she merely looked painfully tired, and kept running a hand over her eyes every now and again. She eventually drew a deep breath and composed a reply.
"I gave birth in the back room of a drugstore in Joliet," she said, through a sigh. "We was on the run again right after, 'cause the smell of blood attracted walkers. So I did what I had to, that's all. A dozen times every day, just what I had to. Aaron, he never cried too much, at least, which helped." Andrea rubbed at her eyes yet again, as if even this short recital had exhausted her, and seemed to lose the thread of the conversation as a result.
"It wouldn't have made any difference, you know," said Diana, and once again the words had escaped her grasp before she could think them through properly.
"What wouldn't?"
"If we'd stayed with you, I mean."
"Hell, I know that," said Andrea, wearily. "I just...look, Diana, fact is you're the one I just don't get," she went on, turning over her shoulder before she did so, making sure that they were alone. Diana cast a glance around the room herself. The two of them were sat by the remains of the fire as it settled in the grate, and the only other people in sight were Tony's twin daughters, who were busy fussing over Nero on the far side of the lounge. The dog was rolled over on his back, hind legs kicking sporadically as the girls scratched his belly, and he looked to be having more fun than he'd had in months. Diana smiled warmly, but by the time she turned back to the conversation, this good-humoured expression had faded.
"In what way?" she asked, trying to buy some time.
"You hated Mark, anyone could see that. So why'd y'all run off with him?"
"I was a stupid, angry, frightened kid back then," said Diana, picking her words with far more care now. "I hated everyone and everything and I was looking for someone to blame, that's all."
"Someone to blame for what?"
"My mother leaving, my father dying, the country being overrun by the living dead? Take your pick," said Diana. "Yes, I might have had bigger issues than your average teen, but I still reacted in basically the same way, by trying to prove that I was a grown-up when in reality, that couldn't have been further from the truth."
"Don't bullshit me, please," said Andrea, levelly. "I know who your papa was and what he did. What I can't figure out is where you fit into it all."
Diana almost laughed at the enormity of the insinuation. Instead, she exhaled smoothly and calmly and closed her eyes for a second before replying.
"Andrea," she said, carefully and deliberately, "I was only eight years old when John Kramer tore my family apart for the sake of teaching my father a lesson in perspective. I didn't have anything to do with that and I didn't have anything to do with what my dad became afterwards. He didn't come back the same, and I don't just mean physically. I knew what he was doing, but I still loved him, so I kept my mouth shut. That was my only involvement. And that's the whole truth."
The moment following this speech should have been perfectly solemn, but the short silence was interrupted by a furious scrabble of claws on the clay tiles as Nero righted himself with very little elegance and padded over to his mistress, nuzzling his nose into her hand. Diana stroked the dog's head without looking down and waited, patiently, for the other woman's reaction.
"Okay," said Andrea, at last. "But you'll understand if I still think this whole situation is damn weird?"
Diana nodded. "Understood," she said. "If you want my final confession, I ran after Hoffman because he's the last piece of my past. Not a very nice piece, sure, but he's all I have left and he's better than nothing."
"And he's been treatin' you okay?" asked Andrea, though Diana could see something extraordinarily fretful in the woman's eyes and knew that there was another implication there, couched in words she knew Andrea wouldn't say out loud in a million years.
"You might not believe me when I say this," she said, gently, "but he does have some honour, and that's something he'd never do. If you wanna know the truth, he's actually been pretty protective." Diana paused, smiled ruefully at an old memory, debated briefly with herself and decided to voice it. "When I was fifteen, we hooked up with another group of survivors for a few days. One of the guys started hitting on me so Hoffman broke his arm in two places."
Andrea sat back, her spine ramrod straight, and for a heartbeat her expression was totally opaque. Then, against all expectation, she softened and slumped on the arm of the couch, leaning her head on one hand, though she continued to study Diana with some degree of wary apprehension writ across her face.
"Maybe I got him all wrong," she said, unexpectedly.
"No, you got him right, all we're talking about here is isolated incidents and a couple of technicalities," said Diana, calmly. "I'm not trying to convince you the guy's a saint, because he isn't. But he is a survivor, because that's all he's ever been."
"And what about you?"
"I'm a survivor, too," said Diana. "I learned from the best, after all."
"So, I just gotta ask," said Andrea, and now a look of slightly shameful curiosity flitted across her features. "How'd he lose that eye?"
Hoffman stepped between them like a wraith, grinned mirthlessly and then cocked his head at Diana.
"This stupid bitch shot me in the face," he said.
