On the way to the drop point, David explains that he respects all religions, but one thing he can assure Rafael is that the Hungries—or walkers, as David and many other Americans call them—are neither Satanic nor supernatural in any way. Nobody knows for sure what biological processes brought about such a bizarre plague upon humanity—specifically the dead reanimating and literally feeding off the living—but whatever catastrophic pathologies were involved, it is David Stern’s unshakable belief that the gods have decided to sit this one out. Whatever caused this horrific outbreak, David can guarantee Rafael one thing: the living—in all their imperfect, lazy, narcissistic glory—started the domino that set off the chain of events.
“Here we go,” David says, pausing behind the cover of an enormous tangle of deadfall logs and boulders. The rainwater bounces up and into the wind as David yanks a tarp off an old modified VW Beetle with the front end chopped off. The sound of a horse nickering and fidgeting nearby draws Rafael’s attention over to movement behind a wall of foliage. There, in the shadows, an old gray spotted draft horse scrapes at the mud, obscured behind the limbs of an ancient live oak. “That’s Shecky over there.” David gestures. “I was out trying to find some vegetation to feed him when I got pinned down by those walkers in the clearing.”
In the unyielding rain, which has now turned the earth to pudding, they mount up the horse. They stow the weapons and picnic basket full of provisions in the Bug’s backseat area, and they climb in. They sit side by side in the makeshift horse-cart, and David snaps the reins, and old Shecky drags them out of the mire and onto a crumbling blacktop road that David is fond of calling a shit strip.
“May I ask you something?” Rafael says moments later, as David weaves though a row of overturned, fossilized wrecks still blocking the two-lane.
David keeps his eyes on the road, gripping the reins. “Of course.”
“What is it that you were doing? Out here all by yourself?”
“Looking for my wife.”
“Barbara?”
David gives him a look. “Very good. Yes. Barbara. She got kidnapped.”
“When did this happen?”
David sighs. “Little over six months ago. Everything was going so well, too. We lived inside the walls of a sweet little town. Name of Woodbury. About two dozen survivors. All ages and types. Got along pretty well, too, considering. It was safe, sustainable, had solar cells, organic farming. But … I guess we were a target.”
“A target?”
David shoots him a glance. “For a while it seemed like every meth-head, drifter, biker gang, and crazy within a hundred-mile radius who hadn’t turned wanted to steal our shit, take over, fuck with us. And the ones that turned wanted to have us for lunch. But we fought back with everything we had, and we repelled most of them.”
“Is this why your wife was kidnapped?”
David stares at the road, the horse clopping noisily, accentuating the pause. “To this day, I don’t know why my wife was taken away from me. It happened one day when most of our people were out working in the fields.” He looks down and takes a labored breath as though the very telling of the story is exhausting and toxic. “This paramilitary group invaded us and took every last child. I think Barbara was taken to keep the kids calm.” His eyes well up. “Babs was always good with kids. Never had any of our own. She was the perennial favorite aunt.”
Rafael frowns. “So they took children? Why would they do that?”
David wipes his eyes and shrugs. “That’s a good goddamn question. Anyway, we all thought for sure they took Babs and kids north to Atlanta—it’s about seventy miles away—and we sent out a rescue team. Gal named Lilly Caul led the group. She was the town leader, a badass, but she vanished as well. I’ve spent the last three months combing that town, and haven’t found shit. Place is overrun with walkers and a small number of survivors you’d be better off avoiding … so searching for somebody is a losing proposition.”
“How is it that you got burned? It looks … how would you say? Recent?”
David gives him a nod. “Happened last week, been on the run ever since.” He takes a deep breath. “When I was looking for Babs in Atlanta, I realized I might be making the oldest mistake in the book.”
Rafael struggles a bit with the phrase. “In the book? What book? I’m sorry I don’t—”
“It’s an expression, it just means I might be violating a classic axiom, a simple rule, an oldie but a goodie. When you and your loved ones have gotten separated, you don’t go out looking for them. You just stay put. Let them find you. If you’re both looking for each other, your paths might never cross. The point is, I got bogged down in Atlanta trying to find them and it hit me. They could be looking for me. I should get my ass back to Woodbury.”
Rafael nods. “Okay … I understand. So how did you get burned?”
“Needless to say, when I got back to our little town, things were not as I expected them to be. While I was away, and the town was essentially deserted, a bunch of bottom feeders moved in. Half the town was infested with walkers, the other half with bandits. They had taken over our homes, our resources—most of these rascals barely old enough to buy liquor. They were feral, they were animals. Actually that’s an insult to animals.” He falls silent for a moment, giving one of the reins a snap and urging the horse around a tight turn crowded with wreckage.
A few walkers mill about the shoulder and reach for the buggy as it passes.
David’s voice grows thicker, coarser with rage. “I saw one of those bastards wearing one of Barbara’s scarves wrapped around his greasy head, I just lost it. I was hiding in the sticks, watching our little town go down for the last time, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I didn’t know if I would ever see Babs or Lilly or the others again … and I just … I lost it.”
He goes silent again, and the hiss of rain blends with the clopping of the horse’s hooves. Rafael waits, then says, “What happened? What did you do?”
“I burned the place to the ground.” David slumps in his seat, his head lolling. For a moment, it’s hard to tell whether he’s going to laugh, cry, or scream. Then the tears track down his cheeks. His shoulders tremble. He swallows the pain and guilt and shame, and he wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “We had a row of old propane tanks that we found, and I snuck in, and I just opened them all up. Rolled them under the courthouse. Set fire to the feed store where the booze was kept and the methane in the alley out back was thick enough to cut with a knife.”
Again his words dwindle into silence. Rafael sits there, thinking about it. “So you got burned by fires? That is how you got some wounds?”
David Stern looks up at the younger man, and his scarred features tighten into a crooked, demented smile. The taut skin makes his eyes look almost feline. “Not as much as those sons of bitches.”
Rafael stares at him for a moment, then gazes out one of the open windows at the passing landscape of rotting woods and moving shadows. Rafael can’t imagine the strings of the world’s destiny not being operated by the Devil right now. He turns back to the older man. “Have you given up?”
David looks at him. “Given up on what?”
“For finding your wife? Finding Barbara?”
David lets out a pained, breathy sigh. “I’ll never give up on that.” He takes a deep breath and seems to shake off his doldrums. “I gotta believe they’re out there somewhere … alive. Babs, Lilly, Tommy, Norma, Jinx, Miles, and those poor sweet little kids … they’re out there … somewhere even better than Woodbury … where they have water and food, and they have a warm place to live … and they’re secure, safe … comfortable. I truly believe this. I believe they’re out there, and they’re alive, and they’ve found a place to call home.”
PART 1
Exodus
Let the groans of the prisoners come before you; according to your great power, preserve those doomed to die.
—Psalm 79:11
ONE
At first glance,
the figures now wandering through this grid of perfectly decorated interiors might be mistaken for masters of the manor, residents of some gracious old mansion strolling the confines of their burnished mahogany corridors and richly appointed parlors. They bump into each other occasionally, and sometimes they lift their pasty white faces to the ceiling to let out primordial, snarling yawps, but for the most part they look at home in these showrooms and alcoves arranged with such pristine taste. One of the denizens has now accidentally fallen backward onto a Scandinavian-designed divan, his ropy purple intestines spilling out of him in braided glistening strands. The former auto mechanic—still clad in a tattered work shirt with the needlepointed name FRED still visible on its breast pocket—slouches languidly there for a moment as if taking a break from his aimless meandering, his head drooping, his mouth oozing black tarry drool. A stark art deco lamp next to the creature—which is currently running off a generator—illuminates the scene with soft, diffuse, flickering light as delicate as moth wings. Other cadavers mill about a dining room sectioned off in onyx, lacquered dividers with Chinese calligraphy etched into the creamy surfaces. A tall Hepplewhite mirror framed in gleaming teak and cherrywood reflects a cluster of the dead scraping past walnut bookcases filled with artificial facades of book spines. These imitation books are stamped with the gilded titles of tomes nobody reads anymore because the reading of fictional strife has become such a luxury: To Kill a Mockingbird, Treasure Island, War and Peace, and Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Beyond the reflection, stretching in all directions, myriad variations of these high-quality, modestly priced rooms in all manner of styles and arrangements create a maze in which dozens more reanimated corpses now mill about and shuffle like slow-moving laboratory rats … until the first shot rings out.
It comes from the darkness beneath an emergency exit sign on the far side of the floor. It’s a small-caliber blast—the report dampened by a noise suppressor—which makes a sound like a hammer striking metal. The walker on the divan whiplashes, a fountain of blood mist and fluids spraying out the back of its skull, creating an impromptu Jackson Pollock blot across the designer drapes behind it. The creature instantly slides down across the front of the cushions, collapsing onto the lovely handwoven Bjork-series throw rug.
More shots ring out from other directions—mostly .38-caliber and under—blowing tunnels through the heads of at least half a dozen more of the dead. Skulls burst open and bodies plunge to the floor en masse, defacing the sparkling furniture with the vandalism of cranial fluids, bile, and blood.
The commotion gets the attention of the remaining fifteen or so walkers, most of them slowly, drunkenly pivoting toward the noise and confusion of their brethren falling around them. Rancid mouths gape open, the creaky vocalizations like steam emanating from the dead concavities of their throats. Figures press in from the shadows behind the monsters, slipping through the gaps between austere oriental room dividers and glass-fronted knickknack shelves.
A stout black woman in a do-rag and dashiki drives a fireplace poker into the temple of the closest walker. An olive-skinned bodybuilder in a wifebeater and love beads closes in from the other side of the floor, swinging a machete in quick succession, shearing open the tops of three dead skulls with the efficiency of a gardener weeding a garden. Behind the bodybuilder, the woman who fired the first shot approaches. Thin, weathered, auburn hair in a tight ponytail, green eyes like a cat, dressed in a Georgia Tech T-shirt, with black cigarette jeans and combat boots, she grips her Ruger .22-caliber pistol in the classic Weaver position—Israeli commando style—her free hand cupped under the grip for stability. She has a full magazine in the firearm, ten rounds, one already gone, and she expertly picks off nine more creatures, one at a time, hardly pausing between blasts.
More humans appear on the periphery—an older, balding man in wire-rimmed eyeglasses, a beefy, bearded, potbellied man in denim, and a teenage boy with sun-freckled skin and an earnest face—each firing on the remaining few walkers with their handguns.
Within seconds, the unexpected infestation of walkers on the ground floor of the huge Atlanta Ikea is foiled in a haze of blue smoke, the ensuing silence as jarring as an earthquake. The store’s inhabitants stand around for a moment, stunned by the abrupt absence of sound (other than a faint dripping noise), looking at each other expectantly. Eventually all eyes turn to the woman with the auburn ponytail—the leader—for further direction.
Lilly Caul slowly holsters her pistol. She can hear the faint evidence of intruders lurking nearby, their breathing barely audible above the dripping noises. Lilly puts her right index finger to her lips, shushing everybody and indicating that no one should relax quite yet. One last task remains to be performed. She points at Tommy, then at Boone, then at Stankowski, and then at Norma, gesturing for them to move behind the cover of the room dividers.
Then she motions to the bodybuilder, Musolino, to follow her.
The big olive-skinned man follows Lilly as she creeps around a row of tall armoires filled with faux glassware and fake mementos. Despite the fact that she spends most of her time on the third floor, in the cafeteria, and in the section of the store earmarked for bedroom sets, she knows practically every square inch of the first floor from studying the store map and walking the corridors, making notes, memorizing every nook and cranny, every potential resource to be cannibalized. Ironically, that’s the best word for what she and the others have been doing—cannibalizing this massive home furnishings center on Atlanta’s north side. Now she has to once again do the dirty work that ensures their safety inside the massive cathedral of consumerism.
In a series of silent hand gestures, she leads Musolino down a narrow service corridor. At the end of the corridor, an unmarked iron door is reinforced with a massive timber across its midsection. Lilly carefully lifts the timber out of its cradle, and then cautiously unbolts the door. She pushes the thing open a few inches.
The rain and wind greet her, the ruins of Atlanta rising in the distance like ancient Mayan temples petrified and blackened by time. The sky hangs low over Ikea’s parking lot, which is littered with human remains and glittering particles of broken glass. The rain blows in great billowing sheets across the scabrous pavement. Musolino wants to build a barricade of razor wire around the ground level but Lilly has vetoed the idea, despite the fact that they’ve had to neutralize several assaults on the place over the last three months. Lilly still believes a barricade would merely draw attention to the treasures inside.
Right then, Lilly sees the broken planking lying around the base of the tall display windows on the south corner of the building. She can see the breach through which the walkers were let in.
She looks at Musolino, gives him a dour nod, and then ejects the spent magazine from the Ruger. She pulls a fresh mag from her belt and shoves it into the receiving port. “Let’s go ahead and finish this thing,” she says.
* * *
The two filthy, emaciated men, each dressed in blood-splattered rags, crouch behind a service door. They each have a .38-caliber revolver, each looking as though it was first used in World War II. They have the shakes and the hundred-yard stares of longtime junkies. The younger one, his eyes rimmed in dark circles from sleepless nights and unrelenting stress, whispers hoarsely, “What now? What the fuck are we supposed to do now?”
“You stupid fucking idiot,” the older one hisses. “We were supposed to go in and fucking take them when the walkers had them distracted!”
“There were more of them than I thought. They had more firepower than I thought.”
“Duh … ya think?”
“But Ollie said there was only—”
“What the fuck does Ollie know about it?! He’s a fucking ice head.”
“Should we get out of here?”
The older one starts to answer when he hears the telltale click of a hammer being drawn back behind him, in the shadows of the stockroom. “Oh fuck, oh Jesus,” he says in a voice suddenly filled with remorse, sadness, an
d regret. He doesn’t even have to turn around.
* * *
Lilly Caul stands behind the intruders. She holds the muzzle of the Ruger mere inches away from the back of the older one’s head. “I’m gonna need both of you to drop those guns,” she says. She speaks in a steady, even, flat tone. “Don’t turn around, don’t say anything, just do it.”
The older one clears his throat. “Okay … got it. Don’t shoot.”
“Please don’t waste us,” the younger one implores in his tattered voice, which is already crumbling into tears. He looks down at the floor in front of him, a child caught with his hand in the till. “We ran out of everything. We have no food, no water … we just wanted to—”
“Excuse me.” Lilly is strictly business. The men do not turn around. They look down, a lot of swallowing and licking of lips going on. Lilly does not raise her voice. “I asked you both to drop the guns, and I will not ask you again. Drop the fucking guns.”
They do what she asks. The guns clatter to the tiles. The older one says, “Can I say something?”
Lilly squeezes off a single shot into the back of the older one’s head.
The loud report—dampened by the noise suppressor—snaps like a firecracker in the enclosed space. The bullet exits out the man’s left eye in a plume of blood mist, the impact sending him folding over and banging his skull on the doorjamb before sinking to the floor in a series of death-rattle twitches.
The younger one is in the process of whirling around when Lilly sends the second round into his temple. He convulses as the blood cloud spits out the other side and strikes the corridor wall in a sticky scarlet rosette three feet wide. The young man keels sideways, collapsing to the floor in a heap of soiled fabric and trembling flesh.
Musolino stands there, two-handing his 9-millimeter Glock, training the muzzle on the still-warm bodies as if they might sit back up or turn at any moment. At length, he relaxes and thumbs the hammer back down and lets out a thin, whispery breath of relief.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 3
