The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  She starts to lose consciousness, losing control of her hands, the steering wheel beginning to turn on its own. How is that possible? The steering wheel is spinning, and the massive Kenworth cab-over has transformed into a carnival ride like those teacups that used to delight Sally as a child, spinning and spinning, lifting her above the twinkling night lights of the Georgia state fair.

  The gravitational tug now yanks her toward the far door, the weight of her injury pressing her down into the blood-sodden seat.

  The sound of wrenching metal drowns the sudden keening wail of her scream.

  * * *

  If viewed from a godlike aerial perspective ten thousand feet above the soybean fields, the next fifteen seconds would resemble a tantrum visited on the scene by an angry child of a giant. It all happens so spontaneously, so violently, so quickly, that it would only be possible from this height to comprehend or parse exactly what is happening. When the massive chain of campers—repurposed by the Drydens as a benevolent mobile prison—finally jackknifes and tips, the world for those on the ground literally shudders at the force of the impact.

  The very earth itself seems to quake with off-the-charts seismic vibrations as the tangled chain of vehicles rams into the ruins of Eve Betts’s overturned flatcar, fracturing the enormous conveyance into three pieces, causing a chain reaction of collisions as the careening campers break apart, each hurling piece of metal slamming into the next object or vehicle in line.

  One of the campers slams into the Airstream trailer, sending the silver beast and its cab into a wild 360-degree spin, mowing down split-rail fences, and chewing through hundreds of walking dead with the bloody efficiency of a runaway harvester.

  The final impact sends the Escalade tumbling onto its side.

  The SUV then violently slides across fifty yards of wet turf before coming to rest in the sudden, jarring, hazy miasma of silence.

  * * *

  Lilly lies there for a second or two, her back screaming in pain. She feels an unidentified body pressing down on her but at the moment she can’t move her neck to see who it is. In the shell-shocked silence, she realizes several things, each of them dawning on her one at a time.

  First and foremost, the kids appear to be all in one piece, knocked around a bit, but generally unharmed. Some of them—the younger ones—softly whimper, while others, like Bobby Quinn and Bethany Dupree, shift their feverish gazes around the sideways vehicle trying to wrap their minds around what just happened.

  Second, it becomes clear that there are two people lying on top of Lilly in tangled heaps—Tommy and Ash—each trying to extricate their limbs from the pileup. At last, Ash pulls her arm out from under Lilly and says, “Lilly, darling, do you think you could possibly remove your knee from my ass?”

  Lilly starts to formulate a wisecrack response when she is stricken with her third realization.

  The vehicle is moving. Just slightly. Not in a straight line, though—its wheels are facing sideways, and still squeaking and turning uselessly. But every few moments, a tremor passes through the bones of the Escalade as though nudged by someone. Then it grows still again. Then comes another shudder, accompanied by a muffled scraping noise, which builds and blends into more sounds of objects brushing past the SUV, making it tremble and creak.

  Lilly smells the thick pall of death-stench, as acrid and rotten as a compost heap. She hears the low, grinding, baritone vocalizations coming from all around the car, a slow, dissonant, Gregorian chant of growling, which in the past has reminded Lilly of a warning sound way in the back of a dog’s throat when violence is imminent, when the animal is cornered and threatened. She tries to see through the Escalade’s windshield.

  Auto-glass does not break in great chunks like a window pane or a drinking glass. It crumbles uniformly upon impact, and usually stays somewhat intact, like a sheet of diamonds. Lilly gazes through this fractured prism now and sees the multitudes of dead congregating around the Escalade. In the distorted shadow-play of geometric fragments, she sees tall ones, short ones, portly ones, emaciated ones, some that are little more than skeletons draped in moldering flesh, all of them drawn to the wrecked SUV. Lilly’s heart practically stops. She sees no escape. No way out. In a matter of minutes, the Escalade will be completely engulfed. It will be a challenge to give this situation a positive spin for the children. Lilly has faced impossible odds before but nothing like this.

  Flinching at another tremor traveling through the chassis, she turns to the children. “Sssshhhhhhhhh,” she whispers softly to them. “Everybody stay really, really quiet.” She gently slides out from under Ash. “Everything’s going to be okay.” She manages a pained smile. Her back twinges, the pang taking her breath away. “We’re gonna be fine … if you just … if you promise to stay very, very quiet … and … and stay inside this car. Let me see everybody nod their head.”

  Most of them nod robotically, fidgeting, squeezed against each other in the narrow vertical seats. Lilly notices Tommy, a few inches to her left, curled into a fetal position, gazing horror-struck through a corner of the windshield at the swarm. The atonal chorus of growls has risen to such a level that it’s becoming hard to hear each other. “Tommy, are you okay? Tommy?”

  He doesn’t respond. He’s spellbound. Lilly notices Ash carefully moving her body out from under the boy, reaching for Musolino’s AK-47. She checks it, very carefully pulling back its charging lever, making as little noise as possible.

  Lilly looks at her. “We still got eight shells left in Tommy’s Mossberg.”

  “I got twelve rounds left in the banana clip.” Ash feels along her right leg for the leather sheath. “I got the Randall knife as well.”

  The SUV jerks, one of the children in back mewling softly with terror. More and more creatures scud up against the undercarriage, scraping along the sides, looking for weak spots. The sideways vehicle teeters, the upholstered interior closing in on Lilly like a luxurious coffin, claustrophobic and airless, as more and more creatures engulf it. She nods at Ash. “There’s an axe inside this crate somewhere, Musolino kept it handy. Look under the seat.”

  Ash twists into an awkward crouch, reaching under the vertical seat. She gets her hand around a brand-new, spotless, three-foot-long Ikea garden axe. “This’ll do nicely,” she murmurs more to herself than to Lilly. “We gotta keep things as quiet as possible.”

  Lilly checks her .22 pistol. “Still got a full magazine for the Ruger—”

  “Good!” Tommy’s voice penetrates the tension like an ice pick. “That ought to be just enough bullets to shoot each one of us in the head!”

  “Tommy!” Lilly hisses at him, not exactly angry, just buzzing with adrenaline and emotion, and maybe even a little annoyed because she knows he’s right. There’s no narrative in which they fight their way out of this. “Keep it to yourself, okay?”

  He shakes his head. “Whatever.” He looks at her, his eyes shiny. “I’m sorry. I’m being a dick.” A tear gathers in the corner of his eye. “To be honest … I don’t really want to die right now.”

  She reaches up and dabs the tear, wiping it off his face. “Neither do I, kiddo. That’s why we’re going to make sure we don’t.”

  “You’re a terrible liar,” he says with his patented crooked grin.

  Ash looks at Lilly. “One thing’s for sure.” She reaches down and tenderly wipes a tear off Lilly’s cheek. “If we die, we’re going to do it together, and we’re going to do it in style.”

  Lilly looks at her. “And we’re gonna take as many of these motherfuckers down with us as we can.”

  Ash gives her a nod, and looks at Tommy, who has gone stone-cold calm. The young man nods back at Ash, and then looks at Lilly.

  “You guys ready?” she says. “We’ll go out through the sunroof.”

  The other two nervously nod not even remotely ready.

  TEN

  It feels like diving into a slaughterhouse, the air dank and sticky, the coppery odors of blood and offal pressing down on t
hem. Lilly shimmies through the sunroof, hitting the ground and rolling for several feet, clotheslining a half dozen unsuspecting walkers, knocking them over like bowling pins. Ash follows, diving and shoulder-rolling in the other direction. Tommy lunges out behind them, letting out a garbled war cry, instantly climbing to his feet and lashing out with his machete.

  Lilly starts in on the closest row of upright corpses, backhanding the skull of the first one with her eleven-inch Buck knife, slicing a deep divot through cranial bone and dura and brain matter, sending streams of gore through the air. She spins and forehands the knife into another one, and another one, and yet another. Very quickly she gets stippled and splashed and spattered, and starts losing track of her comrades. Her eyes take on the slimy red cast of blood, as though a filter has drawn down over her field of vision. Her spine burns, the stabbing pain taking her breath away. There are so many creatures pressing in on her now from all sides, she starts executing a controlled spin, stabbing skull after skull. The bodies stagger and fall, one after another, causing brackish splashes of muddy bodily fluids and long, ropy ejaculate of cerebral fluids swirling through the air.

  In her peripheral vision, Lilly gets only blurry glimpses of Ash and Tommy on opposite flanks, stabbing and slashing and thrusting.

  For one glorious moment, it feels to Lilly as though they might actually beat the odds and fight their way out of this mind-numbing mob of dead. But the waves keep coming, and coming, and coming, increasing in size and intensity.

  Without warning, Lilly finds herself suddenly surrounded by two dozen larger males in some kind of random formation, closing in on her with ferocious, snarling bloodlust. Some of the older ones sport burial suits still clinging to their decomposing flesh, their cadaverous faces full of rotted dentures and jagged, yellowed incisors that gleam in the late-afternoon sun. Some of the younger ones wear gouged and tattered leathers with indecipherable patches from forgotten motorcycle clubs.

  Tommy and Ash have made progress on the opposite side of the clearing, cutting a swath at least fifteen yards wide through the onslaught, but now the twosome gets into trouble, boxed in by an unexpected salvo of creatures from the other side of the wrecked SUV. That’s when Lilly hears the children screaming.

  She glances over her shoulder. Just for a single instant. Just long enough to see the blitzkrieg of dead surrounding the Escalade, countless numbers of them, all stages of deterioration, some eviscerated, some mangled beyond recognition of what one might call human, some clawing stupidly at the broken windshield and side windows, a large portion of them pushing up against the vehicle with enough collective pressure to make it start to teeter on its side. Lilly is too far away to do anything about it, and the recognition of that fact, as well as the momentary pause in her slashing motions, throws her balance off just enough to cause her to trip over her own feet.

  Tumbling to the ground, striking the tender part of the small of her back on an exposed root, Lilly lets out an involuntary cry of agony. Sharp, scalding pain shoots up her spine and takes her breath away. The knife slips from her gasp, the weapon skittering across the ground. She madly claws for it but she loses it in the sun.

  Warning alarms go off in her midbrain. She blinks, her vision bleary now, only barely registering the indistinct, blurry figures looming above her. She fumbles for her gun. Something presses down on one leg, and she realizes all at once that she’s being mauled. One of the creatures—on its hands and knees now, hunching down on Lilly’s left leg—bends down to take a bite out of the fleshy part her thigh.

  In that fraction of a second before the thing can sink its teeth into Lilly’s femoral artery, she grabs it by both sides of its head.

  Call it survival instinct, or call it genetic memory, but whatever the source, Lilly ignores the astronomical odds stacked against her at that moment and continues to keep that iron grip on the creature’s head, paying little attention to the other ragged cadavers now descending on her. She disregards the overpowering odor engulfing her, the rancid, black, greasy stench of rotten meat. In fact, she doesn’t give a single thought to the fact that she will be devoured in a matter of seconds.

  Right then, in that terrible instant before the rest of the creatures dig into her, she focuses solely on those two milky-white pupils staring down at her from deep within a pair of hollowed-out eye sockets. Her gaze remains unyielding, steady as a rock. She stares into those empty, uncomprehending, feral eyes with almost serene defiance. You will never stop us, she says with that stare. I am just one of many.

  The thought echoes in her mind as she closes her eyes and waits to die.

  * * *

  The thunder of a single high-powered rifle blast gets lost in Lilly’s final reverie. But when the cold, wet spatter of blood sprays her face, she opens her eyes.

  At first, she doesn’t trust what she’s seeing. The mind plays all manner of games when the tether has broken, when death is imminent. Forget the light at the end of the tunnel. At the end, the brain will produce vivid hallucinations. All of which is why Lilly can’t believe that the very head she has been holding in a vise grip between her two sweaty palms has literally erupted.

  A vertical geyser of blood jets from an exit wound two inches above the bridge of the creature’s nose, the thing’s body stiffening suddenly with that strange phantom electric current. Lilly still holds on to the creature’s head as the rest of it goes limp in her grasp. Stricken, transfixed by the almost peaceful expression passing over the monster’s face, Lilly finally lets go.

  The attacker collapses to the ground at Lilly’s side in a pool of spreading fluids. More shots ring out. Lilly sits up. Getting her bearings back in stages, still woozy from the near-death event of a minute earlier, she sees dreamlike images of heads snapping back in momentary slow motion, spurting with plumes of pink mist all around her. Bodies tip, and fall, and flop to the ground in heaps. The leather-clad cadavers, the former old men in ragged, gouged pin-stripes, the bloated, drowned females, the casualties of the floods, the teenage girls missing pieces of their torsos, their midsections spilling streamers of intestines as though caught in the ribbons of maypoles—each and every one of them are now collapsing in awkward piles.

  By this point, Lilly has risen to her feet, and has regained enough of her senses to see the source of their high-caliber savior.

  * * *

  “ASH!” The voice booms a hundred yards to the north, emanating from a dark-haired man standing on the rear bench seat of a dusty Jeep Wrangler. Parked in a clearing beside a mangled, flood-damaged barn, the Jeep sits idling in a cloud of its own exhaust and fumes. Its two other passengers stand on opposite sides of the vehicle, each perched on a running board, one with a Remington 700, the other with an M24 tactical rifle. Each man fires at will, taking down creature after creature, gradually clearing the square acre surrounding the Escalade.

  In the Jeep’s rear seat, Jamie Quinn takes his eye off the scope of his AR10 semiauto rifle for just one moment. He has nine rounds left in the magazine and no time to spare. Right now, though, he has to squint against the setting sun in order to see if his eyes are playing tricks on him.

  Even from this distance, he easily recognizes the woman on the ground just now pushing the limp cadaver off her and struggling to her feet—the dishwater auburn hair, the ponytail, the beads and ripped jeans. It’s Lilly Caul, alive and still kicking. Thank God. But Jamie Quinn also sees the unmistakable figure of a statuesque woman on the other side of the walker-infested clearing. She wears a tattered black sleeveless blouse and bloodstained denims, wailing with her Randall knife, dispatching monster after monster. He can see her trademark swimmer’s physique and the sinew of her long arms.

  “ASH!” he bellows once again, his voice lost in the winds. “ASH!—ASH!”

  He puts the scope back to his eye, sees another cluster of creatures closing in on Lilly, and opens fire. Six consecutive booming reports, the shells flinging out the port, ringing and clanging to the ground. More walkers go down b
ehind the crosshairs, one after another tipping over like bottles falling, corks popping, blood mist fizzing like pink champagne bubbles. But where are the children? Where are his babies—Trudy, Chelsea, and little badass Bobby? Where the fuck are they?

  “Does anybody see the kids?!” Quinn hollers to his cohorts without taking his eye from the cup. “You think they’re in that ditched Escalade?”

  “I don’t know, maybe.” Frank Steuben snaps the cocking mechanism on his Remington. “Right now we got more walkers coming at the boy—nine o’clock—on the left. See ’em? Just behind Ash!”

  The three shooters unleash another volley of hellfire on the clearing a hundred yards away, Quinn emptying the remaining rounds in his magazine. The thunderous barrage from the rifles of the other men continues unabated while Quinn ejects the spent cartridge, pulls a fresh mag from his belt, and slams it home into the receptacle under the stock. He yanks the charging lever and fires off another half dozen rounds, eye to the scope, holding his breath, watching the distant creatures whiplash, spin, and fall in halos of pink mist made radiant by the dusky angle of the sun.

  In the narrow visual field of the scope, Quinn can see the situation with Ash and the others changing rapidly. The blood-drenched clearing, bound in thick blue smoke and motes of particulate shimmering in the sunbeams, is virtually cleansed of reanimated dead—at least for the moment—the second wave still emerging from the adjacent forest over a quarter mile away. And now it looks as though Ash has finally recognized the source of the friendly fire, or at least latched her attention on to it. She stands very still for a moment, staring straight ahead, her expression knitted with confusion, looking directly into the crosshairs.

  Quinn’s gut clenches with emotion when he sees her waving, her face brightening with the revelation that her man has returned. He hears her distant call, her voice so beautiful, honey-thick and smoky-rich. “OH MY GOD, QUINN?! QUINN!! IS THAT—?!”