The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  Right then, Lilly and Ash exchange a fleeting glance. Lilly burns her gaze into Ash’s eyes, just for a moment, just enough for a signal to pass between the two women. Ash goes very still, staring at Lilly. In a discreet, furtive shifting of her eyes, Lilly looks at the shotgun on the left, and then at the shotgun on the right. The nod that Ash gives Lilly is barely discernible to the naked eye but it carries much weight and import.

  “It’s only temporary, folks,” Dryden announces from behind them, oblivious to the transaction that has just occurred. He has slowly begun to nudge Norma Sutters and David Stern around the side of the pit. Norma looks as though she is about to pass out, her bruised and battered face downturned, furrowed with pain and desolation. David moves like a robot, emotionless, dazed, somnambulant. “I promise you,” Dryden goes on. “Just as soon as I can secure this place, I’m gonna go ahead and prepare better living quarters for y’all. You’ll see. This’ll be the safest little town in southern Georgia. But for now, you’ll be safe down there, and I’ll make sure you all get plenty of—”

  Lilly makes her move, the sudden and violent explosion of movement cutting off Dryden’s words with the abruptness of a film breaking in a projector.

  Over the space of a single instant, which seems to stutter and jerk like a jump cut in a film, Lilly kicks one of the shotguns—the one pointing at David Stern—out of Dryden’s grasp. The shotgun pinwheels through the air and clatters noisily to the pavement as Dryden rears back, letting out a hard, sharp breath, instinctively squeezing the trigger on the second shotgun.

  Luckily, before the gun has even had a chance to discharge, Ash has rammed her shoulder into Dryden, causing the barrel to jerk to the left. The blast misses its mark, crackling in the sky, the heavy-grain shot ripping through the metal flashing along the eaves of an adjacent building. Most of the children instinctively duck, some of them going down on their tummies and covering their heads as though caught in an air raid.

  Meanwhile, Lilly has moved in and grabbed the second gun, finding herself in a tug of war with Dryden, each of them trying to wrench the shotgun away from the other. Dryden is stronger than Lilly, and he easily yanks the gun out of her grasp. But by that point, Ash has lunged around behind him, her hands still tied behind her back. She executes a perfect knee block—a move that would not be out of place on a pro football field—knocking Dryden’s legs out from under him.

  Dryden topples to the pavement, dropping the shotgun. He rolls awkwardly.

  Ash tries to kick him, but he rolls across the road to the far curb, banging into the cement barrier. Lilly makes a lunging dive for the shotgun, which has come to rest against the curb. She doesn’t see Dryden pulling the small, heavy, leather sap from his back pocket.

  Lilly scoops up the shotgun. She doesn’t see the tall man springing to his feet with the blackjack gripped tightly in his hand. Lilly cocks the slide, injecting another shell, the sound of Dryden slamming the sap down on the back of Ashley Duart’s skull ringing out like a rim shot on a drum. Ash drops to the deck as the big man spins toward Lilly.

  Everything becomes a blur as Lilly raises the muzzle and prepares to fire off a shot when she sees the big, arcing swing of Spencer-Lee Dryden’s arm coming straight at her. The sap strikes her head between the eyes just above the bridge of her nose. The impact is like an ice pick plunging into her brain, the sudden stabbing agony an explosion that stiffens her spine and causes her to instantly drop the weapon and collapse. The leprous pavement of Main Street rises up and slams into the side of her face as she falls.

  The dusk turns to midnight as the dark, silent void draws down over her.

  NINETEEN

  Silent, dreamless, empty time passes, Lilly floating, engulfed in eternal night. She floats and floats, as though entire generations are coming and going. Epochs are passing, glaciers cutting rivers, entire ecosystems springing to life, spanning the centuries, and then dying away. Through it all, Lilly continues drifting in a black vacuum. How did she get here? Where is here exactly?

  In the wake of these questions, a spark of awareness kindles in her midbrain as the sound of a voice penetrates the endless night. “… what was I saying…?” The voice is crackly, staticky, as though coming from a great distance, broadcasting on an ancient, malfunctioning shortwave. “… oh yeah, I remember now, I was talking about keeping them children safe…”

  The words fade in and out of audible range, wavering and warbling in Lilly’s ears as though underwater. She blinks and tries to identify the pale, diffuse blur of light hovering above her.

  “… I promise you this place is only temporary … once I secure the town, we can find a better residential facility … believe me … it’ll be like a regular palace … but for now, this little hole in the ground is home sweet home … in fact, it’s the safest place in the state of Georgia, if you want to get technical…”

  Lilly realizes she is lying on her back somewhere cool, dark, and fetid-smelling. She struggles to sit up but her body is encased in cement. It won’t cooperate. She can’t budge her hands or arms or legs. She feels as though she’s mummified. She can see a portion of the sky above her, and the early-morning sun canting down in brilliant, angelic rays of light. She coughs and gasps for breath. She feels like she’s drowning.

  “Easy does it, girlfriend,” Norma Sutters whispers as she dabs Lilly’s forehead with a cold hank of cloth. Lilly tries to focus on the plump, battered, brown face looming over her. “Gonna be okay, Lilly-girl, that head of yours is as hard as a rock.”

  The rest of the space around her comes into focus. She sees the damp rugs hastily unfurled across the stony floor, the mattresses along one side on which the kids now sit gnome-like with their knees pulled up against their little chests. A few items have been added to the massive hole in the ground, a couple tattered lawn chairs, a cooler, some bottled water sitting on the floor in the corner, and a Coleman lantern, which still burns faintly despite the sharp rays of morning sunlight angling down into the pit.

  To her left, Lilly sees Ash sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring into space, her eyes glassy and distant, a makeshift cloth bandage wrapped around her head where the sap broke the skin. She looks like a dazed patient waiting for electroshock therapy.

  Then Lilly sees David Stern kneeling next to the Slocum twins, ministering to their cuts and bruises with a damp rag. David looks up at her and says very softly, “Look who’s back with the living.” He gives Lilly a forlorn smile, ignoring the rambling soliloquy going on above them, echoing down from the lip of the pit. “Welcome home,” David utters to Lilly, dabbing the child’s scrapes. He smiles again at Lilly and mouths the words, We missed you.

  Lilly manages to sit up, a ballpeen hammer pounding behind her right eye.

  The voice continues droning from above. “Ain’t no picnic protecting people … I’ll tell ya that right now.”

  Lilly leans back against the scabrous cement wall and takes deep breaths, trying to get her bearings. Her sleeveless denim top is soaked in blood and sweat and unidentifiable fluids, making it feel as though it’s glued to her skin. The events of the last few hours come back to her slowly, in flash frames, like the events of a drunken evening coming back to an alcoholic the next morning. The top of her forehead stings, and she reaches up to feel it. She looks at her fingertips and sees crusted, dried blood. Her throat is sore, the stabbing pain in her back returning with a vengeance. She looks up and sees the madman sitting on a lawn chair.

  “You gotta be willing to be the one puts his foot down … the one ain’t afraid to be feared by his people, by his children, feared and respected.”

  The sight of Dryden up there—his mangled, scorched features crestfallen, verging on tears, as he sits in morning sun in his battered aluminum folding chair—nauseates Lilly, makes her dizzy. He addresses his captives like a drunken father making a wedding speech. “There’s gotta be one who protects, one who has the nerve, the stones to keep the bad element away from the innocent, away from the vul
nerable and the weak. I ain’t never won no popularity contests, not by a long shot, but I’ll guarantee you one thing … I guard my precious ones with every last shred of my strength. I will gladly die in the service of guarding my beloved.” He pauses, hitching in a breath, his voice crumbling with sorrow and grief. “My beloved … my beautiful Sally … in the end I guess I couldn’t keep her safe … and I lost everything … everything I hold dear. I failed in my mission.” He begins to sob. His ruined face creases with misery, his tears tracking down his scarred flesh, his voice demolished by grief. “I’m so sorry, Sally, I’m so sorry I failed ya.” He cries a little bit more, and then his eyes seem to fix the people below him. Lilly can feel his glassy stare like the gaze of a dying animal. He sputters and chokes on his words. “This is all my fault … I can’t control myself … I’m sorry, Ashley … Miss Caul, I’m so sorry … I never should have … I’m not … I didn’t mean to—”

  He stops and looks down at the kids, all eleven of them bunched up on the mattresses, the older ones holding and comforting the younger ones. Dryden wipes his eyes. He pulls a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and blows his nose. His permanent grimace of exposed teeth makes him look as though he’s grinning mirthlessly.

  Spencer-Lee stares at the kids as he says, “I’ll never make these mistakes again … I promise you, my sweet babies … I will keep you safe by any means necessary.” His eyes practically roll back in his skull as he cocks his head toward the sound of shuffling feet behind him. Lilly recognizes the telltale noise of walkers, coming from the east, drawn to the ceaseless babbling of the madman. Their stench wafts across the grounds, announcing their arrival. Dryden pulls a long machete from the sheath on his leg. “I will protect y’all from here on in,” he says, almost as an afterthought.

  He turns and quickly dispatches the three stray roamers, two males and a female, each with the filthy rags of former farmhands. The blade sinks into each skull, spilling rancid fluids and putting each creature out of its misery. Lilly sees the bodies fall behind the barbed-wire barrier, one after another, like cordwood.

  Satisfied, Spencer-Lee Dryden turns back to his subjects in the pit and softly proclaims, “Y’all never have to be afraid ever again.” The permanent rictus of a grin widens, his cracked blackened lips revealing more of his exposed, yellowed molars. “Daddy’s home now.”

  TWENTY

  The words reverberate with horrible implications over the next twelve hours. Lilly keeps hearing that terrible phrase—Daddy’s home—echoing in her ears, and she keeps ruminating on the fact that she and her people may very well be trapped in this hideous pit for the rest of their lives. She doesn’t verbalize this, or even hint to them that she’s thinking it, but she can tell the others have drawn the same conclusion. She sees it in their body language and sullen expressions as the madman continues lecturing them, bringing them things, promising them that “Daddy” will never leave their side. Every few hours he lowers foraged food in buckets down to them, plastic containers with various and sundry canned goods, utensils, blankets, lantern oil, even board games that he must have found in some of the surviving homes along Flat Shoals Road. The air in the pit has a moldy, damp quality to it, probably due to the seepage of sewer water through the walls of the cave-in. The crater doesn’t feel temporary to Lilly. It feels like a tomb. In fact, she decides to whisper this very thing to David Stern that afternoon during one of the brief respites during which Dryden has gone off to fetch something else—some other provision or necessary item for their comfort—an interval in which the inhabitants of the pit let down their guards and try to figure things out.

  “I’m trying to look on the bright side,” David grumbles as he combs eight-year-old Cindy Nesbit’s hair with a plastic comb that he’s kept in his back pocket since the Nixon administration. In her nearly catatonic silence and filthy blouse—stained with road grime and gore—the youngest Nesbit child looks as though she stepped out of the pages of a Charles Dickens tale of impoverished waifs and evil headmasters. David has taken a shine to the Nesbit kids. “It’s a hell of a lot better than being out there on your own with all these kids.”

  “Is it…?” Lilly somberly gazes up at the concertina wire and empty lawn chair at the edge of the hole. Her back is killing her. She can’t believe she has returned to Woodbury as a prisoner. She can’t fathom that the darkening sky she’s currently gazing up at is the same sky that looked down on Woodbury all these years. She digs in her pocket for the bottle of Advil. She swallows another handful of painkillers. “You sure about that?”

  David shrugs, continuing to carefully comb the matted hair of the little girl. “No … actually I don’t believe a word of it.” He looks at her. “But I keep telling myself it’s true in order to keep myself from going as bat-shit crazy as ‘Daddy.’” The way David says “Daddy” drips with hate and contempt and something troubling underneath these feelings—something like bloodlust.

  “Point taken.” Lilly glances across the pit and sees Norma checking Ash’s bandages. The tall, stoic woman sustained a series of injuries in the rollover accident that hadn’t revealed themselves until now—a contusion the size of an egg above her hairline, lacerations on the backs of her legs, bruises galore on her arms.

  The kids have currently separated into groups according to family. The Slocum twins sit on opposing lawn chairs playing some modified version of patty-cake, their hearts not really in it. The Coogans are on the other side of the pit, sitting side by side, leaning against the wall, each reading a book thrown down to them earlier in the day by Dryden. For a lunatic, Spencer-Lee Dryden apparently has pretty good taste in middle-school-level literature. Ransacking what’s left of the burned-out shell of a library, he chose a partially scorched The Phantom Tollbooth and The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, the latter of which, in Lilly’s mind, is doubly ironic in this strange context.

  They are all Anne Frank now, hiding from ever more menacing layers of danger. In fact, Bethany and Lucas Dupree, who now sit cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, making a halfhearted attempt to play an old, dog-eared Monopoly game, appear to be signaling each other every few minutes with silent gestures, a nod here, a shake of the head there, a pointed finger, a frown, as if the slightest peep from them will tip the scales from this tenuous stalemate into death and disaster.

  “I never told you how sorry I am about your friend from Cuba,” Lilly says softly to David, wanting to keep him talking, wanting to fill the horrible awkward space with words and the pretense of normality. “How did you two hook up with each other, anyway?”

  “He wasn’t from Cuba,” David says, combing and stroking the passive little girl’s hair. “He was Brazilian, but he was in prison on an island just off the Cuban coast. He was a drug runner. He was also maybe the finest person next to Babs I ever met. He comes out of nowhere down by Thomaston, saves my life, and boom. We’re brothers from that point on.”

  “How did—?”

  “When Dryden showed up, we tried to fight back, and we got separated,” David says, and then proceeds to tell her the whole story.

  Lilly listens carefully, and when David reaches the end of the story, she says, “What did Rafael whisper to you? At the end?”

  David looks down, sorrow twisting his face. “One word. He said, ‘survive.’ I thanked him, and I told him I’d give it my best shot.”

  Lilly looks down. “I’m sorry.”

  David shrugs. “It is what it is.” He swallows the grief and then utters, “I’m still trying to get used to being a widower.”

  “She was the best of the best. Everybody misses her terribly.”

  David doesn’t say anything then, just keeps combing the dirt from Cindy Nesbit’s hair. Then he murmurs without looking up at her, “Sorry to hear about Tommy Dupree, he was a good kid.”

  Lilly looks at him. “Thank you. I appreciate it. But he’s just missing, David, he’s not necessarily gone.” She pauses. “You mind if I ask you something else?”

&nbs
p; “Give the man a break, Lilly-girl,” Norma Sutters chimes in from across the pit. “We got plenty of time for catchin’ up.”

  “No, that’s okay.” David waves off Norma’s edict. “Go ahead.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Blow the town to smithereens.” She gives him a look. “I understand it was a mess, and it was under siege … but why the scorched earth policy?”

  David takes in a breath. He exhales softly before saying, “I’m not proud of what I did. But I was alone, and I was getting bombarded from all directions.” He swallows back the bile and the bad memories. “After you left, the banditos moved in. Every skinhead, every juicer … every psycho cowboy this side of the Mississippi wanted to take this charming little place down. And that’s the thing, they didn’t just want to rob it clean and strip it to the ground, they wanted to destroy the place. Like it was an offense to their shitty lives. How dare someone try to make a beautiful place to live? They wanted to burn it to the ground because of all that it meant to them. It was something they could never build.” Now David looks at her, a rueful, indignant glare, his eyes blazing with righteous anger. “Why did I do it, you ask?” He pauses. “I did it because they were going to do it anyway … and at least I could take that satisfaction away from them.”

  For a brief moment, Lilly stares at her old friend, taken aback by the intensity of his rage. Then she reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. She can feel his muscles seizing up with emotion, his upper body trembling. She gives him a tender squeeze. “I get it. It’s okay. I’m sorry I pried.”

  David stops combing the child’s hair. He reaches over and touches Lilly’s cheek. “You’re a good person, Lilly Caul … I don’t care what anybody says.”

  She lets out a dry chuckle and starts to say, “It’s all water under the—”

  “Listen up, y’all!”

  The baritone voice shatters the calm like a clap of thunder, cutting off Lilly’s words. It sounds as though it comes from the heavens, the voice of an angry god, but as quickly as it insinuates itself into their little hermetically sealed universe, Lilly realizes that it comes from about thirty feet above them.