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Dedicated to All the Missing Children
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Special thanks to the Progenitor of All Things Walking Dead, the Great Mister Robert Kirkman; also love and gratitude to Brendan Deneen for tailoring the suit; Nicole Sohl for commandeering the ship; Justin Velella for extra-special events; and Susannah Noel for brilliant copy editing. Also a grande gracias to the poet warrior, Master Sergeant Alan Baker, for cleaning up my gun gaffs (and more); Andy Cohen, my manager extraordinaire; the staff and volunteers of The Walker Stalker Con, super-fans all; and Sean Mackiewicz for incredible ideas. Also major shout-outs to David Alpert, Shawn Kirkham, Mike McCarthy, Matt Candler, Dan Murray, Ming Chen, Melissa Hutchison, Dixon Martin, Lew Temple, John and Linda Campbell, Jeff Siegel, Spence Siegel, and my amazing sons, Joey and Bill Bonansinga. The biggest thank you of all shall be saved for last: I owe everything I write, everything I am, and everything I dream, to the love of my life, the brilliant and beautiful Jill M. Norton.
PART 1
Stone Soup
Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.
—Proverbs 24:11–12
ONE
On that sweltering Indian-summer morning, not a single person working the rails has any clue as to what is transpiring at that very moment in the small survival settlement once known as Woodbury, Georgia. The restoration of the railroad between the village of Woodbury and the outer suburbs of Atlanta has consumed these people—occupying every daylight hour for nearly twelve months now—and today is no exception. They are closing in on the midway point of the project. In a little less than a year, they have cleared nearly twenty miles of track, and have laid down a sturdy barrier of split-rail and chicken wire on either flank in order to keep the line clear of roamers, stray feral animals, and any other obstruction that might blow, seep, grow, or creep across the tracks.
Now, oblivious to the catastrophe unfolding right then in her home community, the crew’s de facto leader, Lilly Caul, pauses in her post-hole digging and wipes the sweat from her brow.
She glances reflexively up at the ashen sky. The air, buzzing with the drone of insects, is redolent with the fecund stench of fallow, neglected farm fields. The muffled clang of sledgehammers—spikes going into ancient railroad ties—provides a syncopated drumbeat to the thudding diggers. In the middle distance, Lilly sees the tall woman from Haralson—the one who goes by the name of Ash—patrolling the edge of the worksite, a Bushmaster AR-15 on her hip. Ostensibly, she’s keeping watch for any stray walkers who might be drawn to the construction clamor, but on a deeper level, she’s on hyperalert today. Something doesn’t feel right. Nobody can articulate it but everybody senses it.
Lilly peels off her soiled work gloves and flexes her sore hands. The Georgia sun hammers down on the back of her slender, reddened neck where her auburn hair is pulled up in a haphazard French braid. Her hazel eyes, buried in the fine crow’s-feet of her skin, scan the area, surveying the other workers’ progress along the fence line. Although still a few years shy of forty, Lilly Caul has developed the worry lines and wrinkles of a much older woman. Her narrow, youthful face has darkened over the four hard years of plague life. Her boundless energy has flagged in recent months, and the perpetual slump of her shoulders has given her a middle-aged air, despite her trademark hipster attire of tattered Indie-rock T-shirt, ripped skinnies, broken-down motorcycle boots, and countless rawhide bracelets and necklaces.
Now she notices a few errant walkers a hundred yards to the west, dragging through the trees—Ash notices them as well—nothing to worry about at this point but still something on which to keep tabs. Lilly regards the other members of her crew spaced at regular intervals along the rails, slamming post-hole diggers into the stubborn ground cover of kudzu and ironweed. She sees some familiar faces, some unfamiliar, some she just met days ago. She sees Norma Sutters and Miles Littleton, inseparable since they joined the Woodbury clan over a year ago. She sees Tommy Dupree, the boy now fourteen going on thirty, hardened by the pandemic, a prodigy with firearms and edged weapons. She sees Jinx Tyrell, the loner from the North who proved herself to be a walker-killing machine. Jinx moved into Woodbury a few months ago after being recruited by Lilly. The town needs new citizens in order to flourish, and Lilly is exceedingly thankful to have these badasses on her side of the playing field.
Interspersed among Lilly’s extended family are the leaders of the other villages that dot the ramshackle countryside between Woodbury and Atlanta. These are good, trustworthy people such as Ash from Haralson, and Mike Bell from Gordonburg, and a number of others who have joined Lilly’s crew out of common interests, common dreams, and common fears. Some of them are still a bit skeptical of the grand mission to connect the survivor towns with the great city to the north via this rough-and-tumble rail line, but many have joined the cause purely out of a belief in Lilly Caul. Lilly has that effect on people—a sort of osmosis of hope—and the longer these people work on this project, the more they buy into it. They see it now as both an admirable attempt to control an environment that is out of control as well as an attempt to recapture a lost civilization.
Lilly is about to put her gloves back on and get back to her digging when she sees the man named Bell about a quarter mile away, coming around a bend from the north at a fast canter on his swaybacked horse. The thirty-something leader of the small survivor group hunkered down in the little village once known as Gordonburg, Georgia, is a diminutive man with a mop of sandy hair that now bounces and flags in the wind as he approaches the work crew. Some of the others—Tommy, Norma, Miles—glance up from their work, ever protective of their friend and leader.
Lilly hops the guardrail and walks out onto the gravel apron as the man approaches through the haze on his mangy strawberry roan.
“Got another one in our path,” he calls out. The horse is a twitchy animal, thick in the neck, probably a cross-breed with a trace of draft horse in its blood. Bell rides with the awkward, bouncy clumsiness of the self-taught. He yanks back on the reins and staggers to a stop on the gravel, raising a small whirlwind of dust.
Lilly braces the horse by grabbing the bridle and steadying its wildly nodding head. Dirty foam drips from its mouth, its coat damp with sweat. “Another what?” She looks up at Bell. “Walker? Wreck? Unicorn … what?”
“Big old trestle,” Bell says, sliding off the horse and hitting the ground hard with a grunt. A former IT guy from Birmingham, his boyish face sunburned and slathered with freckles, he wears homemade chaps stitched from tent canvas. He fancies himself a country boy but the way he wrestles with the horse and speaks only with the faintest trace of drawl screams city. “About a half mile north of here,” he says, jerking his thumb. “The land ditches, and the tracks go right across this rickety span for about fifty yards.”
“So what’s the prognosis?”
“You mean with the trest
le? Hard to tell, the thing’s pretty furry.”
“Did you take a closer look? Maybe ride across it, test it or whatever?”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Lilly, I just thought you’d want to know about it right away.”
She rubs her eyes and ponders. It’s been a while—months, actually—since they’ve encountered a trestle. And the last one was only a few yards long. She starts to say something when the horse rears suddenly—spooked by either a noise or an odor undetectable by humans. Lilly girds the animal, gently strokes its withers. “Ssshhh,” she utters softly to the creature, rubbing it along its tangled mane. “It’s okay, buddy, chill out.”
The animal has a goat-like scent, musky from its sweaty spoor and filth-encrusted fetlocks. Its eyes are rimmed in red from its labors. The fact is, this broken-down roan—and its species as a whole—has become as valuable to survivors now as they were in the nineteenth century to those attempting to tame the West. Cars and trucks that are still operational are getting more and more rare every day—even the supplies of cooking oil for the biodiesel are dwindling. People who have had even a rudimentary knowledge in horse breeding in their prior lives are now becoming highly sought after and respected as wise elders who are expected to teach and pass on their knowledge. Lilly has even recruited a few to live in Woodbury.
In recent months, many of the rusted-out carcasses of cars have been sliced in half and made into makeshift buggies and contraptions to be hitched to horses and teams of horses. In the years since the outbreak, the pavement has weathered and deteriorated beyond repair. The remaining strips of weedy, crumbling, impassable pathways are the bane of survivors’ existence. Hence the need for a safe, dependable, and fast transportation system.
“He’s been like this all day.” Bell nods deferentially at his horse. “Spooked by something out there. And it ain’t walkers, neither.”
“How do you know it isn’t walkers? Maybe a swarm coming or something?”
“We passed a bunch of ’em this morning, and the things didn’t even faze him.” He strokes the animal and whispers to it: “Did they, Gypsy? Did they?” Bell looks at Lilly. “There’s something else on the wind today, Lilly. Can’t put my finger on it.” He sighs and looks away like a shy schoolboy. “I’m sorry I didn’t check the trestle for stability—that was pretty goddamn stupid of me.”
“Don’t sweat it, Bell.” Lilly gives him a smile. “I think the old saying goes, ‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it’?”
Bell chuckles a little too loudly, holds her glance a little too long. Some of the others pause in their work and glance up at the twosome. Tommy leans on his shovel and smirks. It’s basically an open secret that Bell has a desperate crush on Lilly. But it’s also not something Lilly wants to perpetuate. Taking care of the Dupree kids is all she can handle in her personal life at the moment. Plus, she’s still grieving the loss of just about every person she ever loved. She’s not ready to dive into a relationship yet. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t think about Bell sometimes, usually at night, when the wind whispers through the gutters and the loneliness presses down on her. She thinks about running her fingers through Bell’s gloriously thick ginger-colored hair. She thinks about feeling the downy touch of his breath on her collarbone.…
Lilly shakes off the wistful ruminations and pulls an old Westclox turnip watch from her hip pocket. Attached to a tarnished fob, the watch once belonged to the late Bob Stookey, Lilly’s best friend and mentor, a man who died heroically a little over a year ago trying, among other things, to save the children of Woodbury. Perhaps this is why Lilly has all but adopted the town’s orphans. Lilly still mourns her lost pregnancy, the spark that could have been Josh Hamilton’s child, miscarried in the tumult of the governor’s regime. Maybe that’s why her ersatz motherhood now feels almost like part and parcel of survival itself—an innate piece of her future as well as the future of the human race.
She looks down at the yellowed face of the watch and sees that it’s edging toward lunchtime.
She has no idea that her town has been under attack now for nearly an hour.
* * *
When Lilly was a little girl, her widower father, Everett Caul, once told her the story “Stone Soup.” A well-loved folk tale with myriad versions existing in many different cultures, the story tells of three wandering strangers who are starving when they come upon a small village. One of the strangers hits on an idea. He finds a pot in the town trash heap and gathers some stones and collects some water from a nearby creek. Then he builds a fire and starts cooking the pebbles. The villagers get curious. “I’m making stone soup,” he tells them when asked what the hell he’s doing, “and you’re welcome to have some when it’s finished.” One by one, the residents begin to pitch in. “I’ve got some carrots from my garden,” offers one. “We’ve got a chicken,” says another. And soon, the stone soup is a bubbling caldron of savory goodness with vegetables and meats and herbs from the various homes.
Perhaps the memory of Everett Caul’s beloved bedtime story lay in the back of Lilly’s mind when she decided to connect the small survivor towns in her area with the big city to the north via the defunct railroad.
She had first thought of the idea last year, after meeting with the leaders of the five principal communities. Initially, the purpose of the meeting—which took place in Woodbury’s venerable old courthouse building—was to share resources, information, and goodwill with the other towns in Central Georgia. But when the leaders of the five communities began to vent about their supplies dwindling and travel becoming so dangerous and the feeling of being so isolated out in the rural wastelands, Lilly decided to take action. She didn’t tell anybody her plan at first. She merely began to clear and repair the old petrified rails of the West Central Georgia Chessie Seaboard line that runs up through Haralson, Senoia, and Union City.
She started small, a few hours a day, with Tommy Dupree, a pickax, a shovel, and a rake. It was slow going at first—a few hundred feet a day in the blistering sun—with the walkers continually being drawn to the noise. She and the boy had to repel countless dead in those early days. But walkers were the least of their problems. It was the land that gave them the most grief.
Nobody is certain of the causes, but the postplague ecosystem has changed over the last four years. Opportunistic weeds and wild grasses have taken over to the point of choking culverts, clogging creek beds, and virtually carpeting roads. Kudzu vines have multiplied in such profusion that entire billboards and barns and trees and telephone poles have been literally covered in riotous tendrils. The green rot has turned everything furry with vegetation, including the countless human remains still lying in gullies and trenches. The world has grown hair, and the worst of it seems to have seized up the iron rails of the Chessie Seaboard line in stubborn braids of flora as thick as cables.
For weeks, Lilly and the boy chipped away at the unforgiving vines, sweating in the sun, moving a hand-car northward over cleared sections with laborious slowness. But the noisy work—not unlike the bubbling pot tended by the strangers in the “Stone Soup” story—attracted curious glances, folks peering over the walls of survivor towns along the way. People began coming out and pitching in. Before long, Lilly had more help than she ever anticipated. Some folks volunteered tools and construction equipment such as augers, hand mowers, and scythes. Others brought along maps of derelict rail lines found in public libraries, hand-cranked two-way radios for communication and reconnaissance purposes, and weapons for security. There seemed to be a general fascination with Lilly’s quixotic mission to clear a rail all the way to Atlanta. In fact, this fascination spurred an unintended development that surprised even Lilly.
By the second month of the project, people started seeing Lilly’s foolhardy undertaking as a harbinger of a new era, perhaps even a bellwether of a new postplague regional government. And nobody could think of a better person to be the leader of this new regime than Lilly Caul. At the outset of the third month, a
vote was taken in the Woodbury courthouse, and Lilly was unanimously voted the town figurehead—much to her chagrin. She didn’t fancy herself a politician, or a leader, or—God forbid—a governor. At best, she considered herself middle management.
“In case anybody’s interested,” a voice behind Lilly says as she digs in her pack for her meager lunch, “we just crossed the twenty-five-mile marker.”
The voice comes from Ash. She carries herself with the pronounced swagger of a jock, all bowlegged and muscle-bound. Today she has a Vietnam-era canvas bandolier of twenty-round magazines canted across her Hank Williams Jr. tank top and a do-rag bandanna around her coal-black hair, all of which belies her aristocratic former life in the wealthy enclaves of the Northeast. She ambles up with a half-eaten can of Spam in one hand and a wrinkled map in the other. “This seat taken?” She points to an unoccupied stump.
“Take a load off,” Lilly says without even looking up, digging in her canvas rucksack for the stale dried fruit and beef jerky that she’s been rationing for weeks. She sits on a mossy boulder as she pulls out her delicacies. Lately, only edibles with long shelf lives—raisins, canned goods, dried meats, soup mixes—are all that’s available in Woodbury. The gardens have been harvested to the nubs, and it’s been a while since any wild game or fish have drifted within killing range. Woodbury needs to expand its farming capabilities, and for months now Lilly has been tilling the earth around the periphery of town.
“So let’s do the math.” Ash puts the map in her back pocket, sits down next to Lilly, spoons another gob of Spam into her mouth, and savors the processed meat as though it were foie gras. “We’ve been at it since last June. At this rate—what? We hit the city by next summer?”
Lilly looks at her. “Is that good or bad?”
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