The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

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  To Walker Stalkers everywhere.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Major thanks to the gentleman and scholar, Robert Kirkman, who started it all; also a huge gracias to Brendan Deneen, editor extraordinaire; Andy Cohen, the manager’s manager; Sean Mackiewicz, the voice of reason; Susannah Noel for precision line editing; David Alpert, the rock of Gibraltar; the fabulous folks at Skybound; the badass WSC gangsters, James Frazier, Lee Ann Wyatt, Robin Justice, Jackie Prutsman, Monique Engh, and the amazing traveling staff and volunteers that pamper the celebs; Jon, Lou, Flynn, and all the folks at Forbidden Planet UK; and special shout-outs to Jeff Siegel, Mort Castle, Thomas Losey, Charles Robinson, Eagle Eye Books, Jim and Joe of Comix Revolution, and last but never, ever least, my moral compass, my soul mate, my everything bagel, the most beautiful girl in the room, my wife Jill Norton.

  PROLOGUE

  Los Dias Finales

  Behold, evil is going forth from nation to nation. And a great storm is being stirred up from the remotest parts of the earth.

  —Jeremiah 25:32

  Twenty miles off the coast of Guantánamo, Cuba, on the small island of Ile de la Lumière, a man awakens early to a vague feeling that trouble is headed his way.

  At first, the man has no idea what form this trouble will take, but it very likely will have something to do with the sky, a portion of which he can now see from the vantage point of his cot. Twenty feet above him, the corrugated tin roof of his prison dormitory—battered by recent storms—has lost a single rusty panel to the winds. Through the narrow gap, the man lying on the cot can now see the agitated heavens. Soupy gray clouds have blown in from the south. Something cold and sharp like a bullwhip intermittently lashes the side of the building, making an incessant rattle. An epic storm is brewing.

  Rafael Rodrigo Machado sits up and stretches his weary joints. This morning marks his 1825th day in prison, and his emaciated limbs and sun-dried skin reflect his solitary confinement on this godforsaken spit of desolate beaches, rocky cliffs, and tangled, snake-infested rain forests. Over the last five years, every last guard, administrator, and fellow prisoner has either fled or swallowed the barrel of their 9 millimeter. The suicides—as far as Rafael can tell—have put these men to rest, their bodies left to rot in the unforgiving sun. Maybe they’ve gone to purgatory. Who knows? The only certainty for Rafael Machado now is that he has grown accustomed to being alone. But being alone is not the same as being lonely. Rafael is happy to keep to himself inside the hermetically sealed safety of this ramshackle prison, especially after what he has seen transpiring around him for the last four years or so.

  He gets up and begins the same morning ritual that has comforted him for the last fifty-eight months, three weeks, and two days. He goes to the porcelain basin, washes up with rainwater, and harvests breakfast from his meager garden (he has subsisted on sweet potatoes and collards since being abandoned by the prison staff). At this stage of the ritual, he invariably takes a moment to peer through the slats of the prison walls in the futile hope that things on the island have changed.

  Today, he gazes down the steep, rocky slope to the west and sees the same slumped roof pitches of Igreja do Sagrado Coração—the sad little chapel upon which he has gazed each morning for many months. He sees the same wind-damaged steeple, the cross hanging—ironically—upside down on its broken moorings. He sees the same thirteen parishioners aimlessly wandering the gated courtyard, snarling and spitting like animals, possessed by os demonios do inferno.

  Rafael has seen so many fall prey to the Satan over the last couple of years. He has seen guards succumb to unclean spirits and attempt to eviscerate each other. He has seen fellow prisoners escape only to leap to their deaths off the cliffs to the east. He has seen distant columns of smoke rising off the rooftops of coastal villages, and he has heard the eerie choruses of the possessed at night like the singing of jackals. He believes he has witnessed the ushering in of Los Dias Finales—the End of Days—and for some reason he has remained unscathed in his little purgatory of tin, razor wire, mortar, and Tipuana tipu wood.

  He wonders sometimes if he’s one of those left behind, the orphans of the cosmos. Not that he’s complaining. Since the coming of the End of Days, he has been blessed by the solitude of this crumbling prison, the embrace of these walls—once built to keep felons in, now repurposed to keep monsters out. He has plenty of food and water. He has enough room to take walks inside the periphery. And he has enough time to pray for forgiveness, to sketch on his bark, to play dominoes, and mostly to think. In fact, his routine has remained unchanged for many, many months … until this morning.

  Now he sees the black sky approaching from the South Atlantic, the crackling light around the edges like tendrils of flame. He gapes at the sickly gray curtains of rain—still a few kilometers away but closing fast—and he notices with mounting horror the silver chaos of the sea, the tidal wave off in the distance like a mouth opening its maw. It’s as if the entire ocean is possessed by the same eternal hunger as those poor souls down in the chapel.

  He knows what all this means. As the wind curls around the feeble walls of the prison, shaking the bones of the place as a giant, petulant child might shake a toy building, Rafael swallows back his terror and slowly turns in a 360-degree circle of panic. He knows what he has to do. He just has to wait for the right moment, and he has to accomplish the task quickly … before the entire world collapses around him.

  * * *

  He doesn’t have to wait long. At precisely 11:41 A.M. Cuba Daylight Time, the gale force winds take down the south wall adjacent to the garden. The timbers crack like pistol shots, and the entire section bows outward from a shockwave of air pressure while Rafael cowers behind a pillar.

  Clad in a bright-yellow rain slicker from the deserted guards’ quarters, boots that have been sealed with tape, a tactical knife on his hip, and a scarf tight around his lower face, he jerks at the earth-shaking vibrations of the wall slamming down on the ground outside the cell block. Horizontal rain crashes into the yard with the force of a battering ram, vaporizing the garden and tossing into the ether anything that’s not nailed down. Rafael gathers himself, takes a deep breath, and then plunges into the flickering pandemonium of the larger world.

  Halfway down the slope, he slips and falls, careening on his ass nearly a hundred meters. He lands in a thicket of wild sumac, the rain lashing him, scourging his face. Already he is drenched and feels as though his lungs are filled with cement. The wind whistles like a runaway train. He wills himself to his feet and staggers the rest of the way down the hill to the rugged strip of sand lining the north end of the island.

  The impound yard lies in the boiling gray mist half a kilometer away. Rafael lowers his head and charges as fast as he can toward the graveyard of confiscated ve
hicles, aircraft, weapons, and other accouterments of the drug trade. As a pilot for one of the largest cartels in South America, Rafael never sampled his product, never imbibed in his cargo. He always thought of himself as a professional. He loathed the messier aspects of the trafficking business, the blood feuds, the assassinations, the infighting, the spread of addiction among the poor and the young. Rafael considered himself above it all, a simple deliveryman. Now he prays that his old Bell Jet Ranger helicopter is still chained to its blocks out by the pier, the confiscated items still locked up in the shed next to it. He knows time is of the essence. He probably has less than half an hour before 90 percent of the island—including the impound yard—is underwater.

  Through veils of rain and swirling vortexes of debris, the impound yard materializes a hundred meters away. At first, the ghostly outlines of rusted-out Humvees, motorbikes, and bullet-riddled wreckage appear almost as a mirage, an anachronism from days gone by, a time when gasoline and electricity and crooked politicians were plentiful. Now, Rafael struggles through the deluge and the rising winds, squinting into the mist as he scans the lot.

  His heart pumps when he sees the old chopper chained to the far corner of the gravel apron, the shed next to it still intact and standing. His prayers turn to the Jet Ranger’s fuel tank. He trudges through the storm, goes over to the shed, and kicks the padlocked door repeatedly until its rusted hinges snap. Inside, amid the cobwebs and dust motes, he finds the old arsenal, a cornucopia of firearms, all gauges and calibers, enough to equip an insurgency.

  By this point, the wind has kicked up several degrees of intensity, and a gust smashes into the side of the shed, ripping the entire structure free of its foundation, and knocking it over with Rafael still inside. Guns and ammo cartons spill across the rain-lashed sands. Hyperventilating, Rafael gathers an armload, wrapping a nylon strap from one of the guns around it like bundling cordwood. He struggles to his feet. He has to cross only ten meters or so to get to the helicopter, but it’s an excruciating ten meters. The wind blows the rain in his mouth and up his sinus cavities.

  By the time he reaches the chopper, the tide has reached the edge of the impound lot. Somehow, with rain-slick, frozen fingers, Rafael gets a shell into a cut-down pistol grip shotgun. He aims the muzzle at the mooring chain and jacks the trigger. The gun roars. The blast sends the chain into oblivion.

  Then, over the course of the next hundred seconds or so, Rafael Machado gets lucky. He pries open the chopper door and hurls the weapons and himself into the fuselage. The springs squeak under the seat as he sits down and frantically scans the gauges. Miraculously, the battery has some juice left, the intermittent tone beeping as Rafael flips the power switch. He reaches up and makes sure all the fuses are in, and then he sets the throttle to neutral.

  Meanwhile, the flood tide has pummeled the beach, and now seawater rages under the Jet Ranger’s belly, its skids starting to skate sideways. Rafael thumbs the Start button, and the turbine engine begins to sing. The craft pitches left as the floodwaters swirl under it. The rotor begins to turn, fighting the winds.

  The tsunami hits.

  It feels to Rafael as though his stomach has been yanked into his crotch as the water crashes against the Jet Ranger, tossing it sideward. Rafael twists the throttle, pulls back on the stick, and prays a little bit, as the currents take the aircraft backward down the beach. The chopper is sinking, sliding back toward the black void of the open sea.

  “Vamos!” Rafael’s voice is sandpaper rough, out of practice, speaking in the Portuguese patois of his native Brazil. “VAMOS! VAMOS! VAMOS!”

  The Jet Ranger begins shaking convulsively up through its frame, feeling to Rafael as though it’s about to pop its rivets.

  He gives the throttle all he’s got, and he feels the fulcrum of the rotors tugging, tugging, tugging … until finally, blessedly, mercifully, the contraption detaches from the waters and levitates upward into the dark, violent world of the storm.

  * * *

  At some point, somewhere over the northern coast of Haiti, tossed and whiplashed by the roller coaster of shifting winds, Rafael blacks out.

  He knows this because one moment he’s looking at the gauges, wrestling with the stick, trying to navigate through a gray wall of rain, and the next moment he’s slumped over, staring at the floor between his legs.

  Shaking off the disorientation and the pounding headache from banging the top of his head on the ceiling, he manages to pull out of the nosedive only seconds before crashing into the ocean. He gets back on course. He uses the instruments to nudge the Jet Ranger back on a northerly trajectory. He estimates that he is a little over three hundred miles from the coast of Florida.

  The next hour is a horrendous battle to outrun the beast roaring across the Caribbean. The Jet Ranger fishtails, lurches, and slides sideways. It shudders, it rattles, and it bangs over turbulent patches. The passage of time crawls, Rafael’s hands slick with blood from holding an iron grip on the stick for such a prolonged period. And to make matters worse, he sees that he has only enough fuel in his reserve tank to keep this speed up for another couple hundred miles. He’s going to be cutting it close to the bone. Fortunately, it’s the kind of calculated risk with which he is not completely unfamiliar.

  Over the years, he has fled the authorities through impossible conditions. He has been in high-speed, high-altitude dogfights with heavily armed Federales. He has landed his aircraft on uncharted airfields in the middle of firefights. He has flown less than thirty feet above the rocky earth through mountain passes in Brazil. He has served the most brutal, ruthless, amoral cartel in South America for years, choosing a ten-year prison sentence over becoming an informant.

  Somewhere west of the Bahamas, he gets blown off course. With his fuel down to fumes, his engine sputtering, he pulls his belt from his jeans and shackles his hand to the stick. The chopper groans and leans and starts losing altitude. The clouds begin to break, and through the wisps of vapor he sees the vast pale sea spreading out below him. He sees the whitecaps looming closer and closer.

  He realizes he’s going to die. But he can’t stop staring down at those magnificent breakers rolling under him … which is when he remembers what waves and whitecaps mean when they appear in increasing profusion.

  Way in the distance, on the unbroken horizon line, a green necklace of islands comes into view. He remembers the Florida Keys from his childhood, his grandmother taking him from São Paulo to Key West to visit his aunt Anita. The Jet Ranger coughs and shudders. The engine is running on fumes. Rafael can see the surface of the ocean less than twenty feet below him.

  The rotors begin to fail. He sees the ashen sand of a deserted key two hundred meters away. His heart races. His hand is on fire, icy hot on the stick as he yanks it back to no avail. The Jet Ranger lists at a forty-five-degree angle, and then drifts, and finally goes down.

  The impact slams him into the instrument panel as water rushes into the cabin. He kicks the hatch open. He grabs the bundle of weapons and two life preservers. The chopper starts sinking. He struggles to pull the bulky load and himself out the narrow hatchway.

  The aircraft vanishes into the sea as Rafael starts dog-paddling madly toward the white sandy coastline less than a hundred meters in the distance. Something deep inside Rafael drives him on. It would be a shame to come this far, through all that he’s been through, only to drown within sight of America.

  The last twenty meters are pure agony. Rafael paddles and paddles, his lungs blazing with pain, his vision going haywire. When he finally reaches shallow water, he starts coughing and gasping. He has swallowed seawater. He knows enough of it can kill him. Then he feels the mushy sand beneath his feet, and he heaves the bundle of firearms onto high, dry land. Then he staggers onto the beach, collapses, and vomits milky, salty bile across the white sands.

  He rolls onto his back. The world is spinning. Night is closing in. The dusky clouds hang low—the storm will reach these shores soon. But he feels thankful that
he has made it to America.

  America will be his savior. The Americans will know what to do. John Wayne, Tony Montana, Snoop Dogg, the Dallas Cheerleaders, Pam Grier, and General George S. Fucking Patton. Rafael finds these American icons from his childhood rattling around his brain as he stares at the sky. An American sky. Thank God, thank God, thank God. He made it. He is free, and safe, and in America, and he knows that the Americans will have the answers.

  * * *

  That night, the storm unfurls around him as he trudges inland. He finds an old deserted picnic shelter, builds a campfire under a thatched roof of cypress and banana leaves, rests, and dries out. Billowing curtains of rain envelop the shelter, making Rafael feel as though he’s in a space capsule drifting alone in the black void of the universe.

  The first creature makes itself known around dawn the next morning.

  Rafael is dozing when the thing materializes in the rain, trundling out of the adjacent woods. Drawn by the glowing embers of the fire, it’s a large male in tattered work clothes, maybe a former fisherman, apparently possessed by the same demons that gripped the poor souls inhabiting Rafael’s island. This one is bloated and slimy-wet from exposure to the elements, and it smells of the abattoir.

  Rafael has no time to be heartbroken—he had hoped America would be free of this inexplicable Satanic rule—as the thing lunges at him with its mouth working hungrily, chewing its ghastly cud, its eyes filmed in white. Rafael manages to get his hand around the grip of a Beretta .45 ACP semiauto and asks no questions. He fires three rounds into the thing’s cranium, chunks of its skull flinging off on contrails of blood.

  Science has its trial and error, its control groups and repeated experiments, and its close observation leading to general hypotheses. Rafael stands there for a moment, thunderstruck by the sight of the head-shot creature folding to the ground. The demon has been vanquished by … what? Brain death? The magical countermeasure of breaching the skull? Rafael remembers first observing the phenomena on Lumière, one of the guards ranting, “Solo la cabeza!—SOLO LA CABEZA! Only the head! Only a shot to the head takes them!”