The Walking Dead: Descent Read online

“Duck, man! Duck!”

  Blinking, swallowing hard, Speed crouches down, realizing there’s a figure directly behind him.

  He glances over his shoulder, and for a single instant, right before the dry pop of the Glock, he sees a blur of putrid flesh lunging at him. The female walker is an old woman in tatters with blue-rinse hair like a fright wig, breath that smells of the crypt, and hacksaw teeth. Speed jerks down. The muffled blast snaps, and the old woman’s head erupts in a fountain of black spinal fluid and brain matter, the flaccid body sagging to the ground in a heap. “Fuck!” Speed springs to his feet. “Fuck!” He scans the adjacent tobacco field and sees at least half a dozen more ragged heads moving convulsively over the tops of the weeds and tassels, coming toward him. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

  “C’mon, homey!” Matthew grabs a hunk of Speed’s T-shirt and pulls him toward the trail. “Something else I want to show you before we head back.”

  * * *

  The highest point in Meriwether County is located in the rural hinterlands, not far from the intersection of Highway 85 and Millard Drive, just outside a deserted farm town called Yarlsburg. Millard winds up a steep hill, cutting through a thick copse of pine, and then skirts the edge of a mile-long plateau that overlooks a patchwork of farm fields.

  At one point along this scabrous road, near a wide spot used for blowouts and piss stops, a rust-pocked, bullet-riddled sign proclaims, without a trace of irony, SCENIC VISTA, as though this impoverished hillbilly farmland were an exotic national park (and not some backwater barrens smack-dab in the middle of nowhere).

  It takes Matthew and Speed about half an hour to reach this turnoff.

  First, they have to circle back to where Bob’s pickup is stuck in the mire along Highway 85 and then maneuver discarded cardboard boxes under the massive tires to provide traction. Once they get the vehicle moving, they have to cross five miles of wreckage-strewn blacktop macadam in order to reach Millard. They see small phalanxes of walkers along the way, some of them shambling out into their path. Matthew has no qualms swerving toward the creatures and knocking them to kingdom come like so many blood-filled bowling pins. This slows them down a bit, but they finally see Millard looming in the dusty heat waves ahead of them.

  Then it’s a quick shot north into the hills above Yarlsburg.

  Speed keeps quizzing Matthew about what the hell is so important that they have to go twenty or thirty miles out of their way. Matthew plays it coy, explaining that it’ll all make sense soon enough. Speed gets angry. Why the fuck can’t Matthew just tell him why they’re going on this wild-goose chase? What the hell is it that he wants Speed to see? Is it some fuel source they didn’t think of? Is it an untapped retail outlet? Another Walmart they missed? Why all the mystery? Matthew just keeps nervously chewing the inside of his cheek, driving north and not saying much.

  As they approach the overlook, Speed realizes all at once, in a sick, stomach-churning bolt of recognition, that this is the same place the Governor staged all the military vehicles in the moments before the battle for the prison. Gazing out across the woods, Speed realizes then that they are within a mile or two of the vast gray-brick complex known as the Meriwether County Correctional Facility, and an unexpected jolt of dread travels down his spine.

  Post-traumatic stress comes in many flavors. It can steal sleep and spark hallucinations. It can sublimate itself sneakily into destructive behaviors, drug abuse, alcoholism, or sex addiction. It can be subtly debilitating—chronic panic attacks, an intermittent pinch of the nerves of the solar plexus at odd, inexplicable times. Speed feels this vague, inchoate dread right now in his bowels as Matthew pulls the truck over onto the dusty apron of weed-whiskered gravel and kills the engine.

  This area was the sight of profound mayhem—many deaths, some of them Speed’s close friends from Woodbury—and the miserable vibrations still strum at the air. The prison was where the Governor made his last stand—Custer-like, psychotic, megalomaniacal to the bitter end. It also was where Speed Wilkins first registered the natural leadership capabilities of Lilly Caul.

  Now Matthew climbs out of the truck with the binoculars already in his hands.

  Speed kicks his door open with a rusty shriek of hinges and hops out. The first thing he notices is the overpowering scent of dead flesh hanging in the air, mingling with the acrid tang of smoke. He follows Matthew across the wide spot in the road toward the woods. The tire tracks from the Governor’s massive convoy still scar the dirt—even the waffle-shaped imprint of the Abrams tank can be seen—and Speed tries to avoid looking at the tracks as he joins Matthew at the edge of the forest.

  “Here, take a look down in the meadow.” Matthew points toward a clearing in the thick veil of pine boughs and wild scrub and hands over the binoculars. “And tell me what you see.”

  Speed steps across the clearing to the edge of the precipice and gets his first good glimpse of the prison in the distance.

  The two-hundred-acre lot is still bound in a faint fog of smoke. Some of the caved-in cell blocks still smolder, and will probably continue to do so for weeks. The complex looks like the ruins of some strange Maya temple. The odor is stronger now, and Speed’s stomach flips with nausea.

  With his naked eye he can see the collapsed cyclone fence wreathing the property like torn ribbons, the scorched husks of guard towers, and the blackened craters punched into the cement from grenade blasts. Abandoned vehicles litter the surrounding lots, and broken glass glitters everywhere. Like ragged phantoms wandering a ghost town, walkers lumber here and there without purpose or direction. Speed puts the binoculars to his eyes. “What am I looking for?” he asks while scanning the outer lots.

  “You see the woods to the south?”

  Speed swings the binoculars over to the left and sees the hazy green edge of the pine forest lining the property. He sucks in a breath. The incredible stench of maggot-infested meat and human shit makes his gorge rise and his mouth water sourly. “Jesus H. Christ,” he utters, gaping at the multitudes of undead. “What the fuck?”

  “Exactly.” Matthew lets out a sigh. “All the commotion of the battle must have drawn more of them out of the woodwork than we ever knew. This is just the tail end. Who knows how fucking many of them there are.”

  “I remember the herd,” Speed says, licking his lips. “But I don’t remember anything like this.”

  Speed realizes the implications of what he is seeing just as the rancid air gets the better of him, and he doubles over, falling to his knees. It dawns on him—exactly what this means—right as the hot, burning bile stirred by the stench rises up his esophagus. Still slightly high from all the dope, he roars vomit across the coarse, gravelly earth of the precipice. He hasn’t eaten much that day, and most of it is yellowish bile, but it sluices out of him with gusto.

  Matthew watches solemnly from a few feet away, staring down at his upchucking pal with mild interest. After a few minutes it becomes clear that Speed has spewed every last ounce of stomach acid within him, his right hand still clutching the binoculars, and he sits back with a gasp, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. Matthew waits for the younger man to get his bearings. At last Matthew lets out a sigh and says, “You finished?”

  Speed nods and tries to take deep breaths. He doesn’t say anything.

  “Good.” Matthew leans down and snatches the binoculars away from him. “Because we gotta get back ASAP and do something about this.”

  THREE

  Lilly Caul hears the doors of the Dodge Ram slam just as she is crossing the town square in her patched jeans and ratty sweatshirt, a roll of amateur blueprints under her arm. The sun has begun its long, slow descent into the palisades of black oaks on the other side of the railroad tracks, the shadows lengthening, the light softening into golden motes shot through with whorls of gnats. The hammering and rasping noises of the repair crew have ceased for the day, and now the odors of dinner—Sterno pots filled with root vegetables, field greens, and instant broth—waft across the safe zone, ming
ling with the grassy scent of a late spring evening.

  Walking briskly toward David and Barbara Stern’s building at the end of Main Street, Lilly finds herself distracted by the nervous shuffling of footsteps coming from outside the massive gate, which is currently blocked by an enormous semitrailer. Bob’s pickup is visible through the cab’s windows, as are two figures now reduced to blurs as they hurry around the trailer toward the chain-link entrance. Lilly knows who they are. The blueprints will have to wait.

  All afternoon she has been sketching ideas for the racetrack gardens—her neophyte knowledge of landscape architecture offset by her energy and enthusiasm—and now she is dying to show her ideas to the Sterns for feedback. But the truth is, she’s more interested in hearing about Speed and Matthew’s fuel run. The town’s generators and propane-powered motors are running on fumes. The tanks need to be replenished soon, before the perishables start spoiling and the construction equipment stops running and the candles get used up and the streets plunge into darkness at night.

  She crosses the road just as the young men are squeezing through the gate. Lilly immediately notices that neither is carrying a fuel tank. “No luck finding juice?” she asks as she walks up to them.

  Speed glances around the square to see if anybody is listening. “Hate to tell you, but we got worse problems than a fuel shortage.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We just saw—”

  “Speed!” Matthew steps in between them, putting a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “Not here.”

  * * *

  Inside the courthouse, the gloomy hallway smells of must and mouse droppings, the yellow cone of light chasing cockroaches back into the seams of the ramshackle walls. At the end of the corridor sits the community room—a cluttered rectangle of parquet tile, boarded windows, and folding chairs.

  They enter the room, and Lilly sets the lantern and the blueprints down on the long table. “Okay, start talking,” she says.

  In the dim, flickering light, Matthew’s boyish face looks positively owlish. He sullenly crosses his arms across his barrel chest. His whiskered cheeks and chin—and the look in his eyes—make him look far older than his years. “There’s a new herd forming, we saw it outside the prison.” He swallows. “A big one—biggest one yet—biggest one I’ve ever seen.”

  “Okay. So.” She looks at him. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “You don’t understand,” Speed chimes in, looking into Lilly’s eyes. “It’s heading this way.”

  “What do you mean? Prison’s like—what?—twenty miles away?”

  “Twenty-three miles,” Matthew informs her. “He’s right, Lilly. It’s moving in a northwesterly direction. That’ll take it straight through Woodbury.”

  She shrugs. “At the rate walkers move, all the variables, it’ll take it days to get here.”

  The two men share a glance. Matthew takes a deep breath. “Couple days, maybe.”

  Lilly looks at him. “But that’s if it keeps moving in the same direction.”

  He nods. “Yeah, right. What are you saying?”

  “Walkers don’t move like that. They’re all fucked-up, they’re all over the map.”

  “Normally I would agree with you, but a herd this size, it’s like—”

  He stops himself. He looks at Speed, and Speed looks back at him, searching for the right word. Lilly watches them for a moment and then says, “Force of nature?”

  “No … that’s not what I was going to say.”

  “Stampede?”

  “No.”

  “Flood, brushfire? What?”

  “Fixed,” Matthew says at last. “That’s the only word that I can come up with.”

  “Fixed? What do you mean, fixed?”

  Matthew looks at Speed, then glances back at Lilly. “I can’t explain it exactly, but this one, this herd, is so huge—so fucking huge—that it just keeps gathering up momentum. If you saw it, you would know what I’m talking about. The direction is fixed. Like a river. Until something or someone fucks with it, the direction ain’t changing.”

  Lilly stares at him and thinks about it for a moment. She chews a fingernail and thinks some more, and she stares at the boarded windows and thinks about all the other herds she’s encountered—the most recent one the wave of walkers descending upon the prison during the Governor’s last stand. She tries to imagine a bigger one, a monolithic herd made up of many herds, and it makes her head hurt. She makes a fist, and her nails dig into her palm, the pain bracing her. “Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do first…”

  * * *

  An hour later, darkness pushes into town while Lilly rounds up her newly established council of elders—most of them literal elders—gathering everybody in the lantern-lit community room. She also invites Calvin Dupree in the hope that he’ll be swayed into staying when he hears what’s heading this way. Being on the road with such a manifestation unfurling slowly toward them is not the safest option—especially for a family with small children—and on top of that, Lilly’s going to need as many able bodies as possible to stanch the tide.

  By seven thirty that night, the elders have all taken their places around the battered conference table, and Lilly has dropped her bombshell on them as gently as possible.

  For most of her presentation, the listeners sit stone still in their folding chairs, remaining silent as they absorb the grim narrative. Every few moments, Lilly asks Matthew or Speed to elaborate on what they saw. The others soak it all in, their faces dour. Stricken. Crestfallen. The unspoken feeling in the room is, Why us? Why now? After all the dark days of living under the influence of the Governor, after all the tumult and violence and death and tragedy and loss, they have to deal with this?

  At last, David Stern speaks up.

  “I understand that this is a big herd.” Perched backward on a folding chair in the corner, the trim sixty-something man sports short-cropped hair and an iron-gray goatee, and in his silk roadie jacket he gives off the air of a hard-ass professional nearing retirement, a road manager for a band on their last tour. But underneath the surface, he’s a softie. “It’s gonna be hard to stop, sure—I get that—but what I’m wondering is—”

  “Thank you, Captain Understatement,” interrupts the middle-aged woman in the faded floral-print muumuu next to him. An earth-mother type with long, unruly gray curls and a soft, round, zaftig figure, Barbara Stern is outwardly cranky but, not unlike her husband, tender underneath. The two of them work together with grudging efficiency.

  “I beg your pardon,” David says to her with faux politeness. “I’m wondering if I may possibly speak for just a second or two without being interrupted?”

  “Who’s stopping you?”

  “Lilly, I understand what you’re saying about this herd, but how do you know it won’t just fizzle?”

  Lilly sighs. “I guess we don’t know for sure what it’s going to do. I hope it does fizzle. But for now I think we have to assume it’s going to hit us in a day or two.”

  David scratches his goatee for a moment. “Maybe if we sent scouts out there to keep tabs—?”

  “Way ahead of you.” Matthew Hennesey speaks up from the front of the room. “Speed and I are going out early tomorrow morning.” He gives David a brisk nod. Throughout most of the presentation, Matthew has been standing like a wooden cigar store Indian behind Lilly, but now he gets animated, and his burly laborer’s shoulders bob and weave as he paces across the front wall with its cracked and obsolete portraits of the U.S. president and the former governor of Georgia. “We’ll be able to gauge how fast it’s coming, whether it’s on course, or whatever. We’ll use the walkies to radio updates back to y’all.”

  Lilly notices Hap Abernathy, the seventy-five-year-old bus driver from Atlanta, standing across the room near a boarded window, leaning on a walking stick, looking as though he might drift off to sleep at any moment and start snoring. Lilly starts to say something else when a voice interrupts.


  “What about weaponry, Lilly?” Ben Buchholz sits on one side of Lilly with his gnarled hands folded on the table as if he’s praying. He is a broken-down man of fifty-some years with pouches under his eyes and a tattered golf shirt buttoned up to his wattled neck. The loss of his entire family the previous year has never truly left his rheumy, watery eyes. “If I’m not mistaken, we gave up a lot of the arsenal in the assault on the prison, so where do we stand now?”

  Lilly looks down at the scarred tabletop. “We lost every single fifty-caliber machine gun and most of the ammo. We fucked up. Plain and simple.” An audible moan—mostly rhetorical—ripples through the room as Lilly tries to wrestle the mood back in her favor. “That’s the bad news. But we still have a lot of explosives and incendiary devices that didn’t go up in the fires. And we got that stuff from the Guard depot that the Governor left behind in the warehouse.”

  “That ain’t gonna cut it, Lilly,” Ben murmurs, shaking his head with dismay. “Dynamite’s a blunt instrument from a distance. We need high-powered rifles, automatics.”

  “Excuse me,” Bob Stookey chimes in. He sits on the other side of Lilly, his Caterpillar cap pulled down low on his wrinkled brow. “Can we at least try to stay positive here? Maybe focus on what we got rather than what we ain’t got?”

  “We still have all our personal guns, right?” Barbara ventures.

  “There ya go,” Bob urges her on. “Plus we can pool whatever ammo we each got stashed away.”

  Ben shakes his head, unconvinced. “If what these young fellas are saying is true, you ain’t gonna make a dent in a herd that size.”

  “Okay, here’s my two cents,” Gloria Pyne interjects from the corner. The stout little woman in the tinted visor hat and Falcons sweatshirt chews gum incessantly, her pug-nosed face as tough as a stevedore’s. “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way.”

  Lilly gives her an encouraging nod. “Go on.”

  Gloria wrings her rough hands for a moment, choosing her words. “Maybe there’s a way to … what’s the word? Divert it? Change its course?”