The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  “It’s okay, I got it,” she calls back to him with a dismissive wave. She turns back to the horses and grabs the big one’s bridle. She clicks her tongue and says to the beast, “C’mon, big guy.”

  Norma doesn’t see the walkers emerging from the ocean of darkness behind the adjacent trees. The sun has risen to a point at which the shadows beneath the thick pine boughs completely mask the moving corpses until they are right on top of the road, pushing their way out into open daylight. She doesn’t see Musolino trip on a greasy patch of mud as he races hell-bent toward her, frantically trying to warn her and protect her from the oncoming swarm. She doesn’t notice him sprawling to the flooded pavement, his gun flying out of his arms and splashing into the standing water. More importantly, Norma doesn’t smell the rancid, meaty death-odors until she has pulled the two horses out of the mud pit and led them across the side of the road to the sunken walkway.

  At that moment, she freezes only inches from the ledge running along the flooded river, still holding the horse team by the traces. Her senses immediately fill up with troubling details all piling up on each other—the sound of Bethany Dupree’s scream, the horrible stench of dead flesh, Musolino hollering at her, telling her something about walkers coming, other voices, the cab doors on other horse-wagons shrieking open, other voices crying out. Shots are fired, the air crackling with bullets. All of it jumbles up into an amorphous blob of panic coursing down her midsection like a cold electric current.

  For a moment, Norma stands thunderstruck, clutching the horses’ lead, paralyzed with confusion. The animals are so large that they block Norma’s view of the approaching horde. She can smell them, and she can hear them, and she can hear the gunfire whizzing back and forth. But she doesn’t see anything but shadows closing in on the other side of the horses until it’s too late.

  The smaller horse lets out a keening shriek as the first set of putrid teeth sink into its hindquarters, the larger horse rearing up and kicking its forelegs wildly. The sudden jerking movement yanks the reins out of Norma’s grasp. She sees the walkers now on the other side of the horses, and she realizes all at once why Bethany is screaming, and why Musolino was coming to save her when he slipped and fell, and why the horns are honking and the guns are blazing and the air is filling up with blue haze and rot.

  None of this, though, prevents her from then making a fatal misstep.

  She pivots toward Musolino, and she takes her first leaping stride toward him when she misjudges how close she is to the deeper water’s edge. Her left foot, clad in the same lumberjack-style work boot that she has worn since the plague broke out, slips off the edge of the mossy, ruined stones of the sidewalk.

  She plunges into the water, sliding down the slimy slope of the bank that was once dry land.

  FIVE

  “No, no, no—shit—no, no—fuck—NORMA!—fuck-fuck-fuck—FUCK!” Bound up in the indigo smoke, weaving through the grisly remains of fallen walkers, Lilly shuffles sideways along the water’s edge. She has her .22 still gripped in both hands, madly searching the agitated currents and windblown eddies of the Chattahoochee River. She scans the distant waters for any sign of her friend. The heavyset woman has simply vanished. Only a few tangled pieces of wreckage and deadfall logs now drift quietly and quickly away, coursing downriver on the flood currents.

  Like a streak of lightning zapping across her midbrain, a fleeting memory flickers through the back of Lilly’s panicky thoughts.

  Norma Sutters had always joked about being accident prone, uncoordinated, the first to step on a banana peel. According to her, she was traditionally the last girl picked for softball teams, and seemed to have a perpetual series of casts and splints on her arms and legs throughout high school. She was a disaster on the dance floor, and at graduation she could barely make it up the risers to the dais to receive her degree without doing a comic pratfall into the front row of mortified dignitaries. All of this streams through Lilly’s brain, making her struggle with an overwhelming urge to dive into the flooded Chattahoochee and expend every last iota of her strength searching the muddy river for the former choir director who had become Lilly’s foil, her voice of reason, her loyal opposition. She steps up to the threshold of the deeper water, coiling herself, preparing to jump in, when she jerks at a loud and sudden noise.

  The air behind Lilly erupts with gunfire as Boone, Eve, Tommy, and Musolino wipe out the remaining members of the swarm that only moments ago had come out of the woods like a nest full of tarantulas. Musolino has already completed the tragic task of euthanizing the tow truck’s team of horses, each round fired point-blank into an animal’s elegant head, and now he’s in no mood for heroics as he rushes up to Lilly and grabs her by the arm. “Hey, hey! C’mere, Lilly, c’mere!”

  The big man pulls her aside, ushering her behind the Escalade for privacy.

  Lilly wriggles out of his grasp. “I’m fine. I’m good, okay?”

  “Tell me you weren’t about to jump in.”

  “She’s my friend. Okay? I had to do something to—”

  “She’s everybody’s friend, Lilly, but you cannot do stupid shit like that.”

  “Mus, we can’t lose another—”

  “We can’t lose you!” He jabs his finger at her. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” She stares at him, her emotions working their way up her gut, up her gorge. Her eyes burn. She stares at Musolino’s dark, chiseled face, his whiskers just starting to prematurely gray. His T-shirt clings to his burly chest, damp with sweat and stress. Lilly’s eyes well up. “I understand. Okay?”

  “Look. Norma’s gone. It sucks. It kills me. But we don’t have the luxury to commemorate it. Or we’re all gonna be gone. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “We just have to deal with it and move on. Especially you, Lilly. You’re the honcho. You’re fucking Moses. You’re leading the exodus.”

  “I get it.” She sniffs back the emotions. “I’m just trying to—”

  Lilly abruptly falls silent when a voice behind her interrupts.

  “Lilly?” Tommy Dupree has come around the opposite end of the Escalade and now stands there, nervously stroking the stock of his 12-gauge shotgun, compulsively licking his lips. “Is everything okay?”

  Over the past few months, since the upheavals in Woodbury have plunged Tommy and his siblings into bedlam, the boy has developed a nervous habit of licking his lower lip. He does it so much now that his chin has chapped and turned bright red from the irritation. Every time Lilly notices this sore patch of skin under his lip, it breaks her heart.

  “We’re good, Tommy, everything’s okay,” she tells the boy and then realizes her eyes are welling up. “No it isn’t.” She lowers her head and the sorrow courses through her. Her tears drip to the sodden ground at her feet. “Everything’s not okay.”

  Tommy comes over, and Musolino fidgets uncomfortably, looking down, looking anywhere but at Lilly. Lilly realizes he’s never seen her cry. All he has seen is the badass warrior chick that Lilly has become. And the truth is, there was a time in her life when she would have been embarrassed by this pitiful display. Not anymore. She doesn’t care who sees what.

  Another volley of small-arms fire rings out, making Lilly and the others jump. The protein-rich stench of rotting flesh accompanies the gunfire and sends a jolt of adrenaline down Lilly’s veins. She wipes her face. She looks up and says, “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”

  * * *

  For a single instant that seems to last for ten eternities, Norma Sutters careens through the cold, empty blackness, her body seized with chills, her sinuses and ears and mouth filling up with greasy fluid. She tries to hold her breath and kick, or maybe paddle against the current, but she can barely move. All she can do is drift, and drift. She has slipped off the spindle of her sanity. She has no idea which way is up or down. All she knows is that she’s going to die. She is going to meet her maker. Finally. She’s going to Glory and will touch the hem
of His garment, praise Jesus! Hallelujah, she’s going home! Glory, glory, glory be to Jesus … but wait.

  Wait.

  Lord, what is this? An object registers in her peripheral vision, at first as faint as watercolors swirling above her, glimpsed through layers of silt as her lungs heave and burn with their final dwindling storehouses of oxygen. Something floats above her in the void, at first too milky and diffuse to make out. At this depth, it looks solid, but it’s hard to know for sure. The flow and distortion of the currents disguise it as simply a bruise of color in an otherwise colorless ocean of darkness. Lord, is it an angel? Is this the archangel Michael come to usher her to paradise?

  She feels contradictory impulses tearing at her, the irresistible force of the currents tugging her now, yanking her around the serpentine bends of the river, lulling her into a death trance. The feeling is almost inexorable, like tow chains hooked to her, pulling her down, down … down to her watery grave. But at the same time, the rectangular object above her is shimmering there, maybe ten feet away, beckoning to her with its liquid brilliance. Through the muddy, rheumy medium of the river, she sees that the thing is a mossy shade of orange, bobbing on the surface, speckled with the muted, golden dollops of sunlight that now stipple the land above her. Lord, if this is Thy will, then so it shall be, she thinks as she begins to paddle with her last shreds of energy.

  In a matter of moments she will pass out from oxygen starvation, and her lungs will fill up, and she will sink like a stone, dead by the time the currents decide to deposit her on the river bottom. But the Lord is with her now. He wants her to reach that solid rusty object hovering overhead. Galvanized by the spirit, she feels a bolt of energy flow through her, even as her lungs explode with agonizing, searing pain. She opens her mouth, gasping an involuntary gasp of air, and she inhales water. Her body convulses, the shock of the cold, greasy water almost sinking her. But without even being aware of it, her arms and legs have been paddling and flailing and kicking with every last scintilla of strength for the past sixty seconds.

  The object looms closer, only inches away now, the grain of its planks revealing itself to be a wooden door or a piece of a houseboat’s exterior floating along the floodwaters. Beams of daylight penetrate the upper layers of the flooded river in sharp angles. She reaches for the door with everything she has left.

  Her hand slips off the corner. She sinks. Her silent scream accompanies a second attempt, issuing plumes of bubbles. Paddling, scissor-kicking, she manages to grab the corner of the object, and the thing dips and bobs with Norma’s substantial weight, but it remains buoyant on the surface. Her last burst of energy enables her to pull herself headfirst out of the water and onto the wreckage.

  She sucks in a gargantuan, heaving breath of air and roars vomit all over the surface of the floating door, expelling mostly filthy water mixed with bile. She coughs and coughs, and for a moment she feels as though she might actually cough herself off the raft and back into death’s embrace. But somehow, amid all the heaving and rasping and shuddering, Norma manages to hold tight to the floating door, at first not even aware of how fast she’s drifting along on the swollen Chattahoochee.

  For decades, NASA astronauts have reported the strange phenomenon of walking in space at orbital speeds. Although they are traveling at around seventeen thousand miles per hour, the space walkers feel as though they’re leaving the house for a lazy walk in the park. Since their spaceship is traveling at the same speed, they are relatively “standing still.” Norma Sutters experiences this same surreal feeling right at this moment as she floats along the fast-moving currents of the flooded river. It feels as though she’s barely moving. She doesn’t even notice the landscape rushing past her on either side of the Chattahoochee, the trestle bridges passing overhead. Human remains float all around her, scraping the side of the door, occasionally bumping the front of the makeshift raft.

  It takes a while for Norma to get her bearings. Like a soaked rat, she pulls herself toward the center of the door and collapses onto her belly, the wind and sun in her face. The air hangs heavy with fishy, rancid death-rot. The woods on either side of the river form dense ramparts of foliage and tangled overgrowth, all of which filter the sunlight and cast the river in an eerie green light. As Norma’s mind begins to clear, she starts to notice other things as well. The door on which she now floats, thank you Jesus, has the word GALLEY embossed at one end of the burnished surface.

  The river brims with bloated carnage—mostly undead, Norma reckons—much of which continually brushes up against the sides of the raft. At this location, the Chattahoochee is only about forty yards across, some areas so rife with bodies and body parts that it would appear a person could walk from one side to another without ever touching the water. Norma swallows the burning taste of bile in her throat as a rasping noise pierces her thoughts. It sounds like a beehive is floating by the raft.

  When Norma glances over the edge of the door at the water’s surface, she sees the source of the noise and vomits a second time.

  A severed head floats past the raft, faceup, its eyes wide open like tiny lightbulbs, filmed with waxy white cataracts. Its mouth works busily around rotten teeth, emitting a buzzing sound like a filing metal. Its sharklike eyes scan the sky as though cosmic answers lurk up there somewhere.

  The raft passes the gruesome head, and Norma watches it recede into the currents behind her until it fades out of sight like a tiny bobber abandoned by a fisherman. Norma cannot take her eyes off it. The notion begins to form inside her that this is the end of the end—the final chapter, the last gasp of humanity—and she is drifting through this timeless purgatory because she’s a sinner. The Good Lord has deposited her here to bake in the sun on this pitiful raft until her flesh cracks away and her bones bleach to powder and she crumbles away into dust. She lowers her head to the slimy surface of the door, her tears mingling with the metallic water of the river.

  * * *

  Over the course of the next hour, Norma drifts southward several miles, too weak to paddle to shore, too exhausted to care. She was never very good at geography in school, and now she wonders if the great Chattahoochee River ultimately empties into the Gulf of Mexico, or maybe the Land of Oz. It doesn’t matter. She has no drinking water, no food, no weapons, no hope. She will be dead by the following morning.

  It’s almost comforting to know that one’s time is drawing to a close. The best part is that Norma’s conscience is clear. God knows she’s not perfect. She has sinned as much as the next person, but she has no regrets. She doesn’t fear death. She knows that the Good Lord will do with her what is righteous and just. She has unshakable faith in His mysterious ways. Thinking about this, she coughs up blood, her head so heavy she can barely lift it off the raft.

  She lies on her side and prays that He will take her into His arms soon.

  The river widens, the vegetation becoming increasingly wild and untamed. It’s as though the woods have gone insane, the skeletal roots of massive live oaks reaching out from the flooded riverbanks, plunging into the water like petrified serpents. Chandeliers of Spanish moss hang down so low they brush the floodwaters, and the chaotic growth of kudzu has sent snarled, knotted vines across every surface, every trunk of every tree, every stone and deadfall log, creating a sort of endless verdant tapestry. The water crawls with pathetic scraps and partial human remains still twitching with the cursed energy of the plague. Hands still attached to severed arms float past Norma clenching and unclenching furiously as though their bloated, pasty fingers might grasp the ungraspable. Disembodied human feet bounce along the surface, baring a grisly resemblance to fishing bobbers.

  The farther south she drifts, the more she notices that the buoyant heads seem to be floating upright, staring straight ahead, almost as though they’re craning birdlike out of the water. Chills suddenly spider down Norma’s back when she realizes that the heads are connected to bodies. They are not severed and miraculously floating upright; they are whole, intact walkers dr
agging along the river bottom. It makes sense, too, since Norma remembers from childhood fishing trips that the depth of the Chattahoochee gets notoriously shallow around these parts. This gets Norma up and motivated.

  She fishes a floating branch out of the water, breaks it in half, and makes a weapon.

  A moment later, one of the submerged walkers gets close enough to Norma’s raft for the thing to register her presence. It starts reaching for her, its blackened nails clawing the edges of the raft. It’s a larger specimen that’s been in the water so long its gender has been erased by bloat and decay, now taking on the ghastly appearance of a gigantic baby with razor sharp teeth, currently biting the air with the fury of a snapping turtle.

  Norma drives the sharp end of the branch into the thing’s eye with such force, the stick penetrates the gelatinous material of the eye and the prefrontal lobe behind it with the gruesome sound of a kitchen knife plunging into a head of lettuce. She pulls the stick free, causing a gush of dark cerebral fluids to pour out of the breached eye socket and darken the water around the figure as it abruptly sinks out of sight.

  Despite her humility in the face of death, and her love and devotion to the Lord, and her deep faith in an afterlife, and her respect for all living and nonliving things, she spits at the spot on the water where the bubbles still froth.

  * * *

  Ashley Lynn Duart and her flock of children and parents have trekked less than a mile into Coweta County when the walking dead attack from all sides, the megaswarm infiltrating the deepest part of the woods in a blur of ragged, dead figures stumbling out of the primordial shadows. Pandemonium erupts. Little girls squeal with terror while adults grunt with effort as they lash out at the monsters.

  The sound of a keening howl rings out behind Ash, and she spins and sees Ronnie Nesbit sandwiched between two large male walkers. They tear into his neck with the fervor of pigs rooting and digging a truffle from the stubborn ground. Blood already has started to fountain from poor Ronnie, his wife Dina horror-struck twenty feet away, fighting off two females with a two-by-four. She drops the board and shrieks.