The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  Dressed in a black sleeveless blouse and jeans, her arms sinewy with muscle, she turns to apply the restraints to Spencer-Lee when the man lunges at her.

  For a moment, the two figures collide into a violent bear hug, slamming each other against the opposite wall of the trailer, knocking a shelf full of wineglasses and knickknacks to the floor. Sally comes to across the room, tied to the headboard, her eyes bugging wide and hot with terror.

  On the other side of the room, each combatant goes for the other’s throat, a primal move on each of their parts. The woman is ferocious. She’s a lot stronger than Spencer-Lee would expect, and in the darkness of the room, in the heat of the fight, he almost forgets she’s a lady. Finally, he backhands her hard—as hard as he can—and she lurches backward, tripping over her own feet, and sprawling to the floor.

  Spencer-Lee pounces on her. His head throbs with agony, concussed by the impact of the blackjack. He strangles her. “Fucking goddamn bitch whore,” he growls as he squeezes the life out of her.

  All at once, like a magic trick, she produces a blinding corona of light in her hands.

  At first, Spencer-Lee doesn’t see that she has ignited a road flare. He only sees the sunburst of brilliant pink light in his face, causing his head to whiplash backward. The air sizzles as the searing pain shoots through his skull. His hands slip off her throat as she jabs the flaming tip of the flare at him, grazing his face, again and again, the luminous bloom of sparks finally going into his mouth, the glowing tip thrust so deep it lodges in his throat.

  A strangled noise—part shriek of agony, part psychotic howl of rage—erupts out of him as he collapses backward with the flare still stuck in his throat. He lands hard, knocking over another shelf, clawing at the terrible fire choking him, sending molten hot bits of spittle and burning flesh through the air. Sally convulses on the bed, her muffled screams like hyena howls across the room.

  Meanwhile, Ash has recovered enough to rise back to her feet and snatch the man’s keys and .38-caliber pistol off the bedside table. Spencer-Lee flails on the floor. He claws at the source of agony lodged in his throat. He can’t breathe. His hair crackles and catches fire.

  In another flash of lightning, out of the corner of his eye, he can see his assailant lunging across the trailer and bursting out the door. It makes a sound that he is only dimly aware of—like a muffled, distant volley of thunder in his brain—which throbs in his ringing ears. He finally manages to roll onto his hands and knees, and then somehow dislodges the flaming tip of the road flare from his throat.

  He collapses onto his side, coughing bloody sparks and clutching at a corner of the bedspread. He finally manages to douse the flames with the blankets, covering his head, the stabbing, hot pain unlike anything he’s ever felt. He lets out a honking, pathetic sob. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling tiles.

  The smell of burning flesh and the haze of noxious smoke trigger memories of the conflagration that took his mom and dad. And for one terrible moment, he flashes back to that horrible day during his sophomore year at the U of A when he had to identify their bodies in the Montgomery morgue, their faces barely recognizable, so scorched and burned they looked like plastic mannequins that had melted into the stainless steel surfaces of the cadaver drawers.

  At last, mercifully, the memory fades and unconsciousness rolls over Spencer-Lee Dryden like a tide, taking him down into its cold, black depths.

  * * *

  Ashley Lynn Duart creeps through the rainy darkness, stumbling and slipping on the slimy-wet weeds outside the Drydens’ trailer as she thumbs back the hammer on Spencer-Lee’s police special, her heart thundering in her chest, her eyesight heightened by the adrenaline coursing through her. She must act quickly, decisively, and without mercy if she wants to get out of here alive with the others. She can see the shadowy figures of guards—obviously roused by muffled noises coming from the Drydens’ trailer—coming toward her from two separate directions.

  “Hey!” The first one, an older man known as Fitz, sees her in the rain. “What the hell are you—?!”

  She has already raised the pistol with both hands, taken aim, and squeezed off a single shot. The blast strikes the man named Fitz in the neck, causing him to whiplash, his feet slipping out from under him, his AR-15 assault rifle flying out of his hands. He lands on his back, splashing in the muck—his wound fatal—his lifeblood draining out with the speed of a slaughtered hog.

  The other guard slips behind a tree, pulls the cocking lever, and fires off a fusillade that sounds like a drumroll in the droning storm. Ash manages to drop to her belly at the last possible moment, the bullets zinging over her head, sending a chain of noisy ricochets ringing and sparking across the underbelly of the second trailer. Ash scoots under its chassis.

  She crawls out the other side, gets back to her feet, lurches toward an opening between two of the trailers, and finds the second guard in her sight, the man darting wildly toward the trailers. Before the man can fire, Ash sends three rounds into his gut. The man collapses with his finger frozen on the trigger, sending a volley of gunfire into the sky. The noise mingles with the rumbling thunder.

  Ash hears other guards coming from the far corners of the encampment now, lights snapping on inside windows—some of them on generators, some oil lamps—the muffled sounds of prisoners panicking behind the boarded windows. Ash fumbles for the keys. She knows she has mere seconds to get everybody out of their enclosures.

  The first door sticks, the key jamming in the rusty, congealed bolt. She digs the key into it and shakes it furiously. The door finally gives, and Ash opens it to find four faces huddling in the shadows—two little kids, a father and a mother—gaping out at her with feverish expressions of terror.

  “What in God’s name are you doing?” the father demands to know in a hoarse, sleepy voice. A skinny, pale-skinned former grocery store manager from Augusta, Ronnie Nesbit was snatched along with his wife and two grade-school-aged children from a derelict shopping mall outside Atlanta six months ago. He now wears the customary work uniform of the Dryden cult and has the whipped-dog stare of the brainwashed.

  “We’re getting outta here!” Ash hears the other guards coming around the far corner of the convoy. “Leave everything but the clothes on your back, anything you can use as a weapon, and … and your family!”

  It takes a fraction of a second for Ronnie Nesbit to snap out of his daze. He looks at his wife Dina, and she gives him a nod, and then they help their two kids—a boy and a girl—out of the trailer into the wind and the rain.

  Ash goes to the next door, unlocks it, and finds the Stack family huddling together in their brown work uniforms. At first, John Stack looks reticent, panicky, confused. “What are you—?” he starts to say but then sees the look on her face. Something clicks behind his eyes. Maybe he remembers seeing her coiled on the floor of her trailer like a caged animal. He gives her a quick nod and starts to say, “Do you have any other weapons we can—”

  All at once, a series of noises cuts off his words and all heads turn toward the Drydens’ trailer. The force of the fire has blown out one of the windows. The glass explodes, and flames curl through the rain, filaments of sparks and debris shooting up into the wind. A woman’s scream mingles with the crackling noise of the fire.

  Two more guards come around the corner and try to tear open the Drydens’ door.

  Ash fires her last two rounds at the guards, one of the bullets grazing one of them in the shoulder, the other blast going wide and high, ricocheting off the Drydens’ roof vent. Fortunately, the gunfire slows the guards down enough for Ash to turn to John Stack and say, “Grab that guy’s assault rifle while I get my kids!”

  * * *

  In all the confusion, with the fire in the Drydens’ trailer, the guards coming from all directions, and all the shooting as well as the window blowing out, Ash is able to safely and quickly extract her own kids from the last trailer at the same time John Stack is able to procure the AR-15 off the
body of the fallen guard. John is also fortunate enough to find an extra ammo magazine on the dead man with twenty rounds tucked into its chambers. Nowadays—a good four years into the plague—virgin ammunition is just about as rare as gasoline. But apparently, Spencer-Lee and his men have been able to plunder enough of their clients’ original habitats to stockpile an impressive arsenal. Now, kneeling by the dead man, John Stack works quickly, pulling the man’s pants off him. He springs to his feet and steps into the pants, then stuffs the mag into the belt and quickly searches the corpse for anything else that might be of value. He’s looking for edged weapons, handguns, a lighter, a canteen, or whatever, when the corpse’s eyelids flutter open to reveal opaque white corneas the size and shape of marbles.

  John rears back with a start as the dead guard snarls and bites at the air, its blackened lips peeling away from its exposed incisors.

  Reacting almost involuntarily, John Stack slams the barrel of the assault rifle down into the mouth of the reanimated cadaver, and then twists it up through the nasal passages and into the optic nerve. The muzzle breaks through the dura mater and protrudes out the top of the biter’s scalp like a horn, gushing blood around the rifle’s muzzle.

  Springing back to his feet, John pulls the rifle free of the skull, sending runnels of cerebrospinal fluid into the flooded weeds.

  He hears Ash calling out for them to get their asses in gear and get moving, and he rushes to her side, joining his family and the others as they plunge into the adjacent woods, enveloped in darkness, lashed by the wet winds and unrelenting rain.

  * * *

  The rain eventually lifts, the storm finally moving through the area, leaving behind an eerie stillness as they make their way into the deeper woods. All ambient light from behind them gets squeezed out of the margins, and the darkness sets in like a black pudding. It seems to dampen all sound. The air has a washed-out, crystalline quality now, as well as a troubling scent—smoke, rot, and wet animal fur. Ash hears only her own breathing, and the muffled, wet crunch of footsteps on her flanks. Tandem shadows of children and adults move alongside her and flicker in her peripheral vision.

  The noise of the Drydens’ encampment has completely faded away behind them. Now there are only the sounds of their footsteps, the huffing of their breaths, and the thumping of their hearts.

  “Stay close,” Ash whispers, and brushes her fingertips across the grip of her pistol. She puts a gentle hand on the shoulders of Quinn’s kids. The darkness has become so dense now that she can only see the outlines of their faces, bobbing along like shadow puppets on either side of her. Most of them have shed the ridiculous janitor uniforms and now wear clothes they managed to grab at the last minute. Bobby, the oldest, a tough little nine-year-old cuss with a thatch of unruly black hair, wears faded overalls. His two younger sisters—Chelsea, eight, and Trudy, seven—each have Quinn’s trademark dark eyes and olive skin, and each wears an identical dirty pink sweatshirt.

  Ash would die for these kids, but right now, that’s not an option.

  “I’m tired,” Chelsea Quinn complains. “My foot hurts.”

  “Mine does, too,” Trudy pipes. “How far do we have to go?”

  “Shut up,” Bobby barks at them.

  “Ssssshhhhhh!” Ash glances over her shoulder and sees only a wall of darkness. No flashlights, no dogs, no figures, no walkers … yet. “As soon as we can stop, I promise I’ll make it all better, but right now we have to play the little game I taught you.”

  Trudy looks up. “The runaway game?”

  Ash smiles despite her nerves. “Exactly, honey—yes, that’s the one. Do you remember the first rule?”

  “Keep moving?”

  “You got it. And the second rule?”

  Trudy thinks and thinks, and finally Chelsea chimes in, “Be really quiet?”

  “Exactly.”

  Bobby grumbles, “So that means you can go ahead and shut your traps now.”

  “Bobby—” Ash starts to admonish the boy when a flashlight snaps on to her immediate right. Ash flinches at the light. “Turn that off!”

  Ten feet away, Ronnie Nesbit, still clad in his Dickies work shirt with KEN on the pocket, fumbles with the switch on his small battery-operated flashlight. “Sorry, sorry.” He finally extinguishes the light. “Just thought we might be able to—”

  “It’s okay,” Ash cuts him off, ushering the children down a gentle slope of pine needles and animal droppings, the odor of which braces her like smelling salts. The trees have grown thicker, and the smell of fish off in the distance tells her they are approaching a creek or maybe even a tributary of the Flint River, which is most likely swollen with floodwaters at the moment.

  Ash whispers to the adults, “I just don’t want to give away our position … to whomever … you know … best to use the cover of darkness.”

  “Plus, the last thing we want to do is have the walkers see us,” Bobby Quinn adds with his half-baked nine-year-old swagger, which thinly veils his terror. “That happens, we’re screwed and tattooed.”

  “Yeah, Bobby’s right, because they can see light, too,” little Cindy Nesbit agrees.

  Another young voice from the darkness: “And if they find uth they’ll eat uth all up.” This comes from the youngest child, Teddy Nesbit, a precocious six-year-old. “And then we’ll all be like dead and then we’ll all like turn into them things!”

  “Hey!” Ash addresses all of them in a loud whisper. “What is it about being quiet that you kids don’t understand? Please. I’m asking you to not talk until I say it’s okay. Just stay close and keep really quiet.”

  Now the silence settles back in as they descend the mossy slope.

  Ash shivers. In spite of the low, overcast night sky and complete lack of moonlight—the rain still dripping in the high boughs, filtering down through the black network of branches—Ash can see a faint glint of water in the middle distance. It floats behind the skeins of foliage like rough-hewn diamonds in the darkness, and Ash uses that glimmer as a point of reference, a destination toward which she now leads the group. She has a vague idea of their location. Judging from the movements of the Dryden clan, as well as the chaotic events following Ash’s kidnapping, she knows they are at least forty miles or so south of Atlanta, and at least ten to twenty miles east of Haralson, maybe somewhere near Zebulon or Williamson. One thing she knows for sure: in this part of Georgia, all creeks and tributaries run toward the Flint River. If Ash can get them to the Flint, then she can navigate by that serpentine body of water.

  Eventually, of course, Ash wants to get back to Haralson, where Quinn, the children’s father, and others are most likely tearing their hair out trying to figure out what happened to Ash and the kids. But for now, just being able to locate their position will not only help them escape the threat of a Dryden search party, it will also aid their efforts to get home.

  Ash sees the creek materializing through a break in the trees. Her eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough now that she can see that the flooding is worse than she thought. Timbers and debris and fallen leaves float in the moonless dark along the banks of the stream where a sidewalk used to be. Many trees appear to be submerged up to their middle branches, and a lazy drizzle still pocks the surface with intermittent raindrops.

  She signals for the group to follow her along the snaking shoreline of the creek. Morning is still a good four hours off but if she can get the children to travel through the night, or at least for another hour or so, she’ll be able to put enough miles between her and Spencer-Lee to at least be able to pause for a few hours of sleep.

  Moments later, the moon peers out from behind the thinning, dwindling storm clouds. The pale light seems as bright as a streetlamp to Ash as she follows the twists and convolutions of the flooded creek bed southward. She believes that the Flint is only a few miles away. And once they locate the river, they are halfway home. All at once, she feels better, emboldened, stronger. She smiles at her adopted kids, and they smile back at her. “We’
re gonna make it,” Bobby Quinn says to her.

  Ash gives him a nod, completely unaware that she’s leading the group directly into one of the largest multitudes of the dead that has yet to randomly coalesce in the Georgia farmlands.

  FOUR

  The next morning, well before dawn, Lilly and company light out from Ikea.

  They start out with four modified horse-wagons—a team of two horses on each conveyance—as well as Musolino’s battered Escalade SUV with its .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a tripod on its rear cargo deck, the ventilated barrel sticking out of the rear hatch window. They have a grand total of forty gallons of gasoline left in four separate ten-gallon containers—more than enough to get them to Woodbury, with many gallons left over to run the emergency generators. They also bring along two battery-operated toy walkie-talkies that someone found in the bargain bin of the Ikea children’s department. Lilly decides that she and Musolino will communicate via the toy two-ways. The audio quality of the cheap, plastic devices is inferior but they have no other options.

  At exactly 5:11 A.M., Eastern Daylight Time, the caravan makes its exit through the south ramp of Ikea’s underground parking garage. Tommy and Musolino have ignited two large dumpsters at opposite corners of the street in order to draw the walker population away from the open garage door and create a gap through which they can slip into the city. The procession emerges from the bowels of the building one contraption at a time.

  First comes Lilly and Tommy in their deconstructed pickup, the skeleton of its front half-braced between the two trusty draft horses, each animal frothing at the bit. The two younger Dupree kids—Bethany and Lucas—ride in the rear, nestled in between the spoils from Ikea. Next out is Burt Stankowski, seated in the cab of an old panel van sans its front engine, front wheels, and windshield. The old truck driver is in his element, chewing on a cigar and snapping the reins of another pair of economy-sized workhorses. Four of the children ride in the van’s payload area, tucked among piles of bedding and pillows, accompanied by a stack of board games and a thermos full of Kool-Aid.