The Walking Dead: Descent Read online

  Lilly keeps looking at her. “Actually, what you’re saying isn’t that crazy.”

  Bob is nodding. “The lady’s got something. It would be a way to fight back without burning through a lot of ammo.”

  Lilly looks at the others. “We need to figure out a way to lure them off course. Put something in their way, change the landscape they’re tromping over. Maybe get their attention somehow, dangle something.”

  “Now you’re talking about using somebody as bait?” Ben gives a skeptical shake of the head, his mouth turned down in a sour expression. “Don’t everybody volunteer all at once.”

  “Hey!” Bob scowls at Ben. “What is your problem?”

  Lilly rolls her eyes. “Calm down, Bob. Everybody has a say in this.”

  A beat of tense silence.

  Ben shrugs, keeps looking at the table. “Just trying to be realistic for a change.”

  “Realism we got plenty of right now!” Bob shoots back. “What we need is answers. We need to stay positive, think outside of the box.”

  Another stretch of silence follows, and the tension passes like a microbe from one person to the next. Nobody in the room thinks Gloria’s idea is all that terrific, but no one can come up with anything better, and nobody is more acutely aware of this than Lilly. Her first true test as a leader has come sooner than she expected, and the sad fact is she has no idea what to do. Deep down she’s starting to have second thoughts about stepping up. She loathes being responsible for other people’s lives, and she dreads the possibility of getting more people killed. The scars of losing her father and Josh Hamilton and Austin Ballard are still festering inside her, eating away at her sleep at night.

  She is about to say something else when she notices Calvin Dupree sitting alone against the back wall next to a battered, bankrupt vending machine. He looks like a little boy who’s been grounded. Lilly wonders if he rues the day he and his family inadvertently stumbled upon this little township. He stares back at her, his eyes narrowing into a worried, furrowed look of concern. “Lilly, I don’t want to interrupt,” he says, “but when we’re done here, I’d like to speak to you in private, if that’s okay.”

  Lilly looks around at the others with a shrug. “Sure. Of course.”

  Everybody looks awkwardly down at the table, at their hands, at the floor—as if the answer is down there somewhere among the cracked, filthy ceramic tiles. But no answer is forthcoming.

  Only more skeptical silence.

  * * *

  Lilly meets with Calvin in the railroad shed out behind the courthouse. One of the only buildings on the west side of town untouched by the fires of the previous week, the shed is the size of a two-car garage and lies within the safe zone, protected by surviving sections of the wall. Inside the dark, ransacked structure, the windows are boarded and the air is musty, with bags of cement mix and potting soil stacked to the cobweb-clogged rafters.

  “Does your offer still stand?” Calvin asks Lilly after she has latched the door behind them and lit a lone kerosene lantern near a stack of ancient railroad ties. The pale yellow light flickers off Calvin’s lean, angular features, making his intense gaze even more intense.

  “What offer is that, Calvin?”

  “The offer to take my family in, let us stay and join the community.”

  “Of course it still stands.” Lilly cocks her head at him. “Why wouldn’t it?”

  “You need strong backs, right? You need healthy bodies, people to pitch in? Like me. And my boy Tommy. I mean, he’s only twelve, and he’s a handful—gives me grief at every turn—but he can lift his own weight in hay bales.”

  “Yes. Absolutely, Calvin. I already told you, we need you and your family. What are you getting at exactly?”

  “A deal.”

  She stares at him. “What do you mean, a deal? What are you talking about?”

  Calvin looks pained all of a sudden, his gaze softening in the lantern light. “Lilly, I believe the Lord has brought us to your town for a reason. Maybe the reason will be revealed later, maybe never. I don’t know. It’s not for me to say. He works in mysterious ways. But I believe with all my heart and soul that He has guided us here.”

  Lilly nods. “Okay … fair enough. So what do you have in mind?”

  “You seem like a good person.” Calvin looks as though he’s about to cry. His eyes well up with emotion. “Sometimes you trust someone simply because your heart tells you to trust them. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “My wife is ill.”

  Lilly waits. Something important is about to be transacted. “Go on, I’m listening.”

  “To be honest, it’s an invisible illness. Most of the time. But these days, it’s very dangerous—a dangerous liability.”

  “I’m not following, Calvin.”

  He swallows air, a single tear tracking down his gaunt, whiskered face. “We’ve been kicked out of two other settlements. People don’t have the luxury to be Christian about it nowadays, they don’t have the luxury to be sympathetic. It’s survival of the fittest, and those who are weak, who are damaged somehow, they get shunned … or worse.”

  “What’s the illness, Calvin?”

  He takes in a girding breath, wipes his face. “She’s had a couple of different diagnoses—bipolar disorder, clinical depression. Before the Turn, she was in the care of a psychiatrist who was helping her. Now she’s … she’s … she tried to take her own life a couple times.”

  Lilly nods sadly. “I get it.” She licks her lips and tries to ignore the heavy feeling pressing down on her, squeezing her heart. “I’m sorry.” She looks at him. “You mentioned a deal?”

  Calvin looks at her. “Back in Augusta, before things went bad, she was taking lithium, and it seemed like it was helping.” He takes a deep breath. “You got a solid group of people here, Lilly. Good people, decent people. You got this fella Bob and you got this infirmary—you got medicine, people with medical training—”

  “Calvin, Bob is a far cry from a psychiatrist. He was a medic in the first Gulf War. And as far as I know, we don’t have anything even remotely like lithium.”

  “But maybe you could find it. Some of the same places you found the other medicine—this drugstore Bob was talking about earlier—maybe they got some there.”

  Lilly slowly shakes her head. “Calvin, I wish I could promise you that we’ll find some … but I just can’t do that.”

  “I’m not asking for promises, Lilly. Just that you’ll try.”

  Lilly nods. “Of course we’ll try.”

  “If you do that for me, if you try and find this medicine for Meredith, I will talk her into staying. She’ll listen to me, she doesn’t want to be out there any more than I do. What do you say, Lilly?”

  Lilly lets out a sigh.

  She never was much good at saying no.

  * * *

  The next twenty-four hours bustle with a grim sort of purpose—inside and outside the walls of Woodbury—as Lilly delegates and directs. She assigns Gloria Pyne to work with Matthew and Speed throughout the night on a way to alter the course of the herd. By the first light of dawn, they have come up with a strategy: They will use incendiary devices along with any other flammable liquid they can spare to start a controlled fire line across the eastern edge of the herd, in essence blocking the path to Woodbury. It’s not an infallible plan, but nobody has a better one.

  At the same time, Lilly asks Bob to put together a small team of men to go on a run to find lithium at the derelict drugstore that lies just beyond the wall on the east side of town.

  It takes a few hours for Bob to prepare his team, showing them a map of the area surrounding the You-Save-It Pharmacy, priming them to watch for the danger areas in the adjacent ruins, and familiarizing them with the layout of the drugstore. During past missions, Bob has discovered an unexplored lower level beneath the store—previously inaccessible due to padlocks—which may or may not contain untapped reservoirs of medicine and supplies. B
ob plans to make an assault on the building later that morning with Hap and Ben.

  Meanwhile, Matthew, Speed, and Gloria set out at dawn to put the fire line into play.

  They use Bob’s pickup on back roads and uncharted trails to get as close as possible to the trajectory of the herd. Matthew calculates the herd’s position by extrapolating the speed with which it was traveling and plotting their course along a straight line through the farmland directly west of the prison.

  At eight thirty, they see the first signs of the herd in the woods west of Highway 85, about twelve miles outside of Woodbury. Gloria sees it first from the jump seat in the back of the pickup as the truck roars up a steep grade of blacktop. “Yo! Gentlemen!” she says, pointing at the distant forest. “Look at the treetops!”

  In the rays of early-morning sunlight, the primordial mists clinging to the ancient oaks are stirring and shivering like jittery ghosts, the tops of gnarled limbs trembling with the pressure of the unseen swarm below. Matthew takes the next side road, a winding serpentine of asphalt, up into the hills immediately to the south.

  Fifteen minutes later, they find a vantage point along the edge of the two-lane. Matthew pulls the truck over, parks and gets out, the others following, the air festering with the noxious, maggot-infested odors of the dead. They use the binoculars to see down into the thicker trees.

  In twenty-four hours, their number has grown. Now a wave of undead the size of a vast flood tide oozes through the shadows of the forest, more than a thousand strong. Emitting an eerie humming noise, hundreds and hundreds of low growls forming an atonal chorus, they slowly stumble into each other, bumping and scraping tree trunks, tripping over themselves, but somehow, somehow, in their haphazard and wooden march, they continue in an eastwardly direction, slowly but steadily, maybe a mile or two an hour.

  It doesn’t take a genius to do the math.

  FOUR

  It takes an hour to lay down the fire line. They choose a parched low-lying, rocky area just north of Roosevelt State Park. The long, flat meadow of scrub grass lies about two miles northeast of the herd’s current position and spans a section of land directly across its path. The area is maybe eight miles or so from the outskirts of Woodbury, which allows enough of a safety buffer in case the fires spread. Georgia has weathered a series of horrible droughts since the plague broke out, and now the wetlands across the south part of the state are like tinderboxes just waiting to be set off by the next well-placed lightning bolt.

  Matthew, Speed, and Gloria work quickly and silently, communicating mostly with hand gestures, following the plan set forth by Lilly and Bob. They hurriedly lay down a chalk line—using a hand-operated contraption found at the elementary school soccer field—to ensure that the fire is surgically precise and burns in a straight line. Then they unfurl nearly a hundred yards of thick rope to absorb the flammables. Last, they hurriedly pour various accelerants along the line, carefully keeping them from splashing their clothing or seeping into the earth.

  Pulling one huge plastic container after another from the pickup’s cargo bay, they use isopropyl alcohol from Bob’s infirmary, ethanol from the abandoned farm and fleet shed, gallons of old liquor from the tavern on Flat Shoals Road, kerosene from the storage warehouse, and even the guts of old fireworks found in one deserted home on Dromedary Street. The final step involves covering the line with kindling in the form of railroad ties and building timbers gathered around the periphery of town.

  By nine forty-five, they’re ready. They take their position on a nearby hill—less than a hundred yards to the north—and crouch in the shadows of enormous hickories, swatting mosquitoes.

  After a few endless minutes, they smell the first hints of the herd coming, the telltale odor detectable long before anyone actually glimpses the leading edge. The air vibrates with that infernal symphony of moaning and snarling right before Speed gets his first visual of the distant ragged figures materializing on the horizon, emerging from the trees like an army of defective wooden soldiers.

  “Right on time,” Matthew whispers, gripping the small radio controller and crouching behind a massive tangle of deadfall logs.

  His heart races as he prepares to ignite one end of the fire line with his makeshift detonator—a device jerry-rigged from a remote-control airplane found in a ransacked Woodbury hobby shop.

  The black tide of undead approaches the fire line, and Matthew waits until they are right on top of the booby-trapped timbers. He thumbs the ignition button, and the end of the line sparks hot and magnesium bright in the sun.

  “Burn, you sons o’ bitches,” Gloria utters under her breath as she watches the flames lick across the hundred-and-fifty-yard-long line, the fire catching the leading edge of walkers unawares, gobbling up their moldering clothes, enrobing their pallid faces in cocoons of flame. The fire builds. Within seconds, the entire front rank of walkers goes up in ribbons of brilliant flame.

  The maelstrom flags up into the sky as the fire spreads through the herd. Apparently walkers are as flammable as any fire hazard, with their methane rot radiating off gore-soaked garb and maggot-infested innards. The maelstrom rages brighter and hotter than expected as the entire vast army of undead goes up.

  “Oh no … no, no,” Gloria moans after witnessing the unexpected phenomenon, ducking and pulling her visor down to shield her face from the shockwave of heat and light. “No, no, no, no, no, fuck no. FUCK!”

  Matthew just stares through watery eyes, aghast at this unforeseen development.

  They have made a huge mistake.

  * * *

  Bob and his team rifle through shelf after shelf of empty pill boxes and unmarked cartons of pharmaceuticals in the derelict drugstore on Folk Avenue and keep coming up with nothing. They’re working in the dark, in more ways than one, Bob with a miner’s light on his dented metal helmet, Hap and Ben with penlights lodged between their teeth.

  All they can find are acne medications, hemorrhoid ointments, and cryptically named medicines long ago left behind by looters. All the juicy central nervous system drugs are long gone. They search for another ten minutes or so until Bob finally holds up his hand. “Okay, time out, fellas. Hold on.”

  Hap and Ben pause. They pull their penlights from their mouths and look at Bob.

  “I’m thinking it’s time we try the cellar.” Bob’s miner’s light casts a yellow beam that shrouds his leathery features in silhouette.

  The other two men shrug, looking neither pleased nor displeased with the idea. Finally Ben says, “You sure you want to go to these lengths?”

  “What lengths? What are you talking about?”

  “Risking our lives so some nutcase housewife can get her meds?”

  “We don’t know she’s a nutcase, Ben. Believe me, it’s best for all of us, we get her stabilized.”

  Ben shrugs again. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  * * *

  Minutes later, after Bob has broken the padlocks and the men have descended service ladders, Hap Abernathy struggles to see through his half-assed Walgreens eyeglasses. Engulfed in the moldy darkness of the drugstore cellar, turning in a half circle, trying to focus on the movements of the other two men, Hap realizes right then and there he never should have insulted that young optometrist back at the LensCrafters in Belvedere Park a month before everything went to hell. But that smug little shit in that stupid white lab coat kept making cracks about “men of a certain age” as he examined Hap’s eyes, and it made Hap so crazy he finally shoved the instrument tray over and walked out. But now, almost two years later, he’s trying to survive Armageddon with dime store specs and it’s driving him crazy.

  “Slow down, gents,” Hap calls out to the others, aiming his measly little penlight into the pitch-black ahead of him. Through the filthy spectacles he can see blurry beams of light sweeping across cluttered metal shelves and an octopus of soot-filmed furnace conduits snaking up into the stalactites of exposed plumbing. He hears Bob’s gravelly voice through the darkness.

&nb
sp; “Follow the sound of my voice, Hap—looks like they got cartons of old medicine stacked up on these shelves, probably expired back around the Clinton administration, but you never know.” Hap starts shuffling toward the voice and the blur of silver light. “Holy crapola!” Now Bob’s voice sounds off in a higher register. “What in the fucking wide world of sports is this?”

  “Whaddaya looking at, Bob?” Hap shuffles closer, the silhouettes of two men materializing in the gloom. They stand in the corner of an ancient brick-walled chamber strewn with packing straps, old lumber, mouse turds, and dust as thick as fur on every surface.

  Hap shines his penlight down at the spot in the corner toward which the two other men now gape, mesmerized, fascinated. Hap blinks and stares. The wall is a blur, and he has to adjust his eyeglasses for a moment to see what they’re looking at. At last, he registers the ancient seam running up the herringbone brick at least five or six feet high, with rusty, congealed hinges sunk into the grout, barely visible along one side. “Judas Priest,” Hap utters breathlessly as he realizes just exactly what he’s staring at. “Is that a door?”

  Bob nods slowly.

  Hap stares. “Where do you reckon that goes to?”

  * * *

  Typical! Lilly sets her walkie-talkie down for one second to go to the bathroom and all hell breaks loose. Damn thing is silent as a brick all morning, not a word from Matthew and company—regardless of the fact that Lilly has been doing air checks every fifteen minutes or so while she’s been supervising the fortification of the town—and now the thing starts squawking as she’s pissing in the lone Porta-Potti outside the construction site.

  She reaches for the roll of toilet paper when she hears another burst of Matthew’s tinny, anxious voice outside the door of the enclosure. “Lilly, you copy? You there? Hello? Where are you? Something … something really fucked-up happened … Hello? Hello! HELLO!”

  Lilly hurriedly finishes her business and pulls up her pants. Since her miscarriage three weeks ago, she has suffered a persistent bladder infection, and even this morning, she notices a certain tenderness in her abdomen as she kicks open the plastic door. “Coming, for Chrissakes,” she grumbles under her breath. “Keep your panty hose on.”