“I need y’all to pay attention because it’s story time!” The burned man clumsily pulls the folding chair back into position at the gate cut into the barbed-wire enclosure. He sounds almost drunk, as though he tippled something during this supply run. But soon Lilly realizes that he’s not inebriated at all. His speech is softened and slurred by a wave of tremendous sorrow coursing through him. He’s grieving, and this pronouncement is more than likely part of the process. He flops down on the chair.
“This is for the children,” he says, opening a large, shopworn leather folder. He holds his machete in his hand as he reads, ever aware of moving shadows behind the buildings, drawn to the sound of his voice. Lilly can’t tell if he’s reading published pages or his own insane scrawl. “It’s for the children because I love them, and my mama used to read to me when I was just a little tyke, so here goes.” He takes a deep breath. “Once upon a time, there was a beautiful queen who lived in a beautiful land.”
Lilly looks around the basin of the crater as the others gaze upward in uneasy, silent awe. Some of the younger kids have taken seats on mattresses or against the wall, and are already sucking their thumbs, listening intently to the man they were prepared to kill only twenty-four hours earlier, as though the simple pleasure of a bedtime story overrides everything, and reverts them, heartbreakingly, to their default personalities.
“The countryside was green and lush and filled with beautiful flowers,” the lunatic in the lawn chair above them is saying, reading from his worn-out portfolio. “There were flowers of all species, there was bougainvillea that climbed up the walls of every castle, and orchids dipped in every color of the rainbow, and daylilies of all shapes and varieties. The lovely tobacco fields to the south of the kingdom were sumptuous and healthy with crops that the people of the kingdom sold to buyers around the world.”
Lilly sits down on one of the unoccupied lawn chairs and lets out a sigh. Her spine simmering with that relentless, dull ache, her brain battling the flood of contrary emotions—rage, desolation, disorientation, all touched off by Spencer-Lee Dryden’s insane soliloquy—she finds herself wondering if this is the man’s autobiography.
“In the heart of this kingdom, there was a dashing, handsome king who ran things with fairness and love, and the people of the kingdom were happy. The king made the kingdom run on time like a perfect, flawless watch, and he loved his fair queen with all his heart. But the queen was sad because she could not have children. She cried sometimes, late at night, alone in her bedchamber. But then, the great tribulations came. The scourge of a great plague spread across the land and infected the kingdom with a horrible sickness. The plague turned the ones who had passed away into demons, cannibals, flesh-eating monsters who—”
A thunderous boom cracks open the sky, making Lilly and everybody else in the pit jerk at the sudden roar.
Spencer-Lee Dryden lurches forward, midsentence, as though pushed by an invisible hand, as the front of his neck and chest erupt. His machete flies out of his hand and tumbles into the pit, landing at Lilly’s feet. Like a valve on a pressure cooker busting off, Spencer-Lee’s cartilage and bone fragments and blood jettison through the air over the pit. The pink spray rains down on the occupants of the crater. Lilly flinches at the blood spattering her face. But she doesn’t look away. She can’t take her eyes off the body thirty feet above her as it sags and collapses to the ground, its arms dangling over the ledge like dead vines.
“Lilly?”
The voice—weak, garbled, and yet familiar—sounds as though it’s coming from somewhere above them, from across the street, or perhaps from a nearby rooftop, carrying on the breeze. Again, Lilly thinks she might be imagining it.
“Lilly!—You down there?!”
Now Lilly looks at the others, and she sees from their startled expressions that she’s not imagining any of this. It’s really happening, and that voice belongs to exactly whom she thinks.
TWENTY-ONE
At first, as the gangly fifteen-year-old appears above them, peering over the ledge next to the corpse, silhouetted against the setting sun, nobody notices anything unusual about Tommy Dupree, other than the fact that he’s filthy, soaked in river water, and covered in mud and cockleburs from his long journey. Nobody sees anything out of the ordinary as the kid crouches there, near the lip of the crater, still clutching his Winchester. He looks down at the forlorn faces in the shadows of the pit. A series of gasps, sighs of relief, and even a few whispered prayers rise up to greet him. “Oh my God,” he says, gaping. “What the fuck?”
“Watch your language,” Lilly says with a grin, staring up at the boy. A surge of emotion rises in her, practically taking her breath away. She can’t stop grinning. “Thank God … thank God you’re still kicking. What the hell took you so long?”
Tommy emits a strange combination of a chuckle and a cough, his voice dry as flint, as he gazes down at his friends and siblings. He looks beyond exhausted. “Back off, lady … I got here as fast as I could. I got turned around near Mountville.”
In the dusky light, his face furrows with cognitive dissonance as he tries to compute the madness he sees spread across the darkness of the pit. He sees the seamy mattresses, the makeshift latrine in the form of a galvanized tub in the corner, games and cards spread across the rugs, and blood spatters stippling the ground and the haggard faces staring back up at him. But mostly, he sees the hollow gazes, the beaten-down spirits.
In a soft, wheezing voice, he utters, “What the hell was this guy trying to prove?”
“Don’t try and figure it out,” Lilly says. “It’s not worth it.” She hardly notices the tears in her own eyes. The boy’s silhouette has blurred above her, softened by the sunset and the wetness of her gaze. She wants to drop to her knees and thank God for sparing this beautiful young man. She wants to unleash a torrent of tears, but she refuses to lose control. Not yet. She stuffs it back down her throat. She knows that she doesn’t have the luxury of expressing feelings right now. She allows herself one extra quick smile at Tommy. “God, it’s good to see you.”
He grins back at her. “It’s good to be seen, believe me.” Something in the boy’s voice sets off an alarm in Lilly’s brain. His words are slightly softened by fatigue, slurred around the corners just slightly. “I was wondering if I’d ever make it.”
Norma Sutters stands off by herself, head bowed, plump hands clasped, softly reciting prayers of thanks.
David Stern stares at the boy. “I think you grew a foot since I last saw you.”
Lilly chimes back in. “Listen, kiddo, we’re all totally happy to see you, and we’ll have a wonderful reunion, believe me, but right now we gotta get everybody out of here before that gunshot draws a crowd.”
“I’m on it!”
Tommy rises slowly, laboriously. He wavers for a moment, as though drunk or sick, and then gets his bearings and vanishes back into the deepening shadows descending upon the town. Nobody notices the way he’s favoring one arm, nor does anyone yet see the dark circles around his eyes or the flushed quality of his face.
Day is slipping into night, and the sky has turned the color of rust. For those in the pit, it’s getting more and more difficult to see clearly. The sudden plunge back into silence spooks some of the younger kids. Seven-year-old Lucas Dupree takes a step forward, still clutching his sister’s hand. “Is Tommy coming back?” he wants to know. “Is he leaving again? Where’s he going?”
Lilly kneels in front of the boy and strokes the child’s soiled cheek. “Your brother’s not going away, Luke … he’s just going go get something to help us get out of here.” She kisses his forehead and smiles. “Your brother’s an honest-to-goodness hero.”
The child nods, still looking a little gun-shy and incredulous, intermittently gazing up at the ledge, pondering the heap of flesh that used to be Spencer-Lee Dryden. The body has stopped twitching and now lies stone still.
“Lord, lord, lord … what a world,” Norma Sutters says, gazing at the body. “
What kinda world we livin’ in?”
David Stern keeps shaking his head, gazing up at Spencer-Lee Dryden’s lifeless arms dangling over the ledge. They look strangely forlorn. David Stern can’t seem to formulate any words for it. He just keeps shaking his head.
Tommy returns with a coil of rope in his arms. “I remember seeing this in the old train station building. It’s a little scorched around the edges but it should work.” He starts lowering the rope. “Tie it around your shoulders.” He leans out over the ledge and gets dizzy—Lilly can see it on his face, in his body language—and for the first time since he arrived to rescue them, he looks terribly sick. “I’ll lift each of you one at a time and—”
His knee slips on the grease of Spencer-Lee’s blood, and he drops the rope.
Letting out a feeble little yelp, Tommy makes one desperate lunge to grab hold of the ledge but the surface is too slippery.
He plunges into the pit.
* * *
The boy lands hard on his side next to the piss tub. His breath knocked from his lungs, his body wracked with pain, Tommy turns over onto his back and gasps for air as though suffocating.
Lilly rushes to his side. She kneels, cradling his head and stroking his hair. “Tommy, you okay? Breathe! C’mon, breathe!”
The others gather behind Lilly, their horror-struck gazes fixed on the boy, as Tommy finally catches his breath and mutters, “So that happened.”
“Can you sit up?” Lilly helps the boy rise up into an awkward sitting position against the crater wall. She brushes a matted strand of hair out of his eye. “It’s okay, just breathe.”
Tommy takes a few shallow breaths, looking around the pit, still disoriented. “God, I’m such a fuckup.”
“Ssshhhhh.” Lilly strokes his hair. He feels hot, feverish. “You saved us, kiddo.”
He looks at her. “Should have taken that son of a bitch out at the clearing when I had a clean shot.”
“Sshhhh, that’s enough. You came through with flying colors. Everything’s gonna be fine, we’re gonna get out of this hole and … and … we’re gonna be fine.”
He nods and swallows the pain and tries to breathe as deeply as possible.
Lilly looks up at Ash, and the two women exchange grim, foreboding looks. Neither one of them is certain of anything anymore, especially something as farfetched as their escape from this tomb of a crater. Lilly glances at the sky a million miles above them. The daylight has faded even further. The heavens have now melted into deeper shades of red and gold, the edges of the clouds stained with deep scarlet as though the sky is bleeding.
Much worse than darkness, though, is the veil of death-stench rolling in now on the cool, clammy twilight, smelling of a desecrated slaughterhouse. Lilly can tell the horde is coming, drawn to the gunshot. She can hear the distant buzz like massive wasps marshaling for an attack. The sound puts a fine layer of gooseflesh on her back. The slow-moving shadows have already started to surround the edge of the pit. Lilly is about to look for weapons when she sees the cloth wrapped around Tommy’s mud-spattered arm.
At first, Lilly hadn’t put all the pieces of the puzzle together—his hoarse voice, his red-rimmed eyes, his cough, his lethargic movements—but now the realization trickles like ice water down Lilly’s spine. She realizes why he felt so warm a minute ago. “What’s this, Tommy?” She points to a tourniquet in the form of a torn, blood-soaked piece of his shirttail wrapped tightly around his left forearm with a stick just below the elbow.
He swallows hard. “I was gonna tell you.” He flinches at a stabbing pain. It seems to take his breath away. “It happened just a few minutes ago.”
“Oh God … okay.”
“So ironic … got all that way here without getting bit, and then I get to Woodbury, and boom.”
“Fuck.”
“I was coming into town when this little one darted out from behind a tree.” He winces again. “Got the jump on me. I didn’t see it coming.”
“Tommy, Jesus … why didn’t you…?” Lilly looks around the crater as though an answer lies in the shadows somewhere. She looks back at the boy. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I was gonna tell you when you got outta here.” He coughs. “I fought that little thing off and managed to get my knife in through an ear but she nipped me. Got me just above the wrist.” He nods at his left arm. “I got a tourniquet on it pretty quick, but it’s not helping. I’m pretty much toast, Lilly.”
“Stop it!” She springs to her feet. “We’re gonna take care of it!” She hears the gnashing, grinding, shuffling drone of the horde pressing in on them. She looks up and sees the first ragged figures milling about the ledge of the crater, pressing in on the barbed wire, brushing up against Dryden’s massive corpse. Two large males claw at the overturned lawn chair. “These motherfuckers will not beat us,” Lilly hisses through clenched teeth. Then she addresses the dead directly. “YOU WILL NOT FUCKING TAKE HIM!”
“Lilly?” David Stern’s hands are on Lilly’s shoulders now, making her jump slightly. “Lilly, you know we can’t—”
“No!” She shoves the older man away. She kneels next to Tommy, her eyes watering, her heart racing, her mouth dry with panic. She inspects the arm. “The tourniquet should hold off the infection long enough to—”
“No, Lilly, listen to me!” Tommy looks at her with old soul eyes, sad and full of horrible knowledge. “I’m cooked. It’s over. I’m okay with it. I just need you to—”
“STOP SAYING THAT!”
Lilly’s voice crumbles, the tears coming, her heart breaking, but she ignores it, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, frantically looking around the pit for something to use on Timmy’s infected limb. In her chaotic state, she doesn’t notice the massive cadaver above her, the one that used to be Spencer-Lee Dryden, abruptly shuddering as though electricity were jolting through it. Lilly is too preoccupied with her frantic search of the pit to realize that the thing that once was Spencer-Lee is opening its eyes. Over a fraction of a second, its burned face creases in on itself, blackened lips retracting away from an enormous exposed rictus of teeth, a low guttural growl roaring out of it.
Most importantly, Lilly doesn’t notice how close the huge, reanimated corpse is to the ledge overhanging the pit until it’s too late. She doesn’t see it slipping and flailing on the gore-slick precipice, sliding over the edge, until a scream rings out next to her.
“LOOK OUT!”
Lilly looks up and instantly jerks backward, the enormous figure plunging down into the pit, landing with a watery splat on the hard ground in front of her.
Breathing hard, gaping wide-eyed and thunderstruck, Lilly fumbles for the fallen machete. The creature sits up with the gravitational force of a catapult, driving it toward the closest warm, living flesh.
Before Lilly even has a chance to swing the machete, the big corpse has latched on to her left leg just above the ankle, its yellow teeth sinking through old denim and down into her tendons.
TWENTY-TWO
The machete flies out of Lilly’s free hand, the pain is so enormous and sudden. She kicks the creature off her, scooting backward on her ass, and then springing to her feet. The searing pain jolts through her with the intensity of a deadly electrical shock. It sends her rearing backward, breathless, knocking over three of the children and slamming into the crater wall.
Now the thing that once was Spencer-Lee Dryden lurches toward the kids, drooling and snarling with feral hunger, arms outstretched, fingers transformed into frozen claws. A salvo of ear-piercing squeals bursts out of the younger children as Ash dives toward the creature, slamming into it as hard as she can, knocking it backward. The enormous dead man staggers but refuses to go down.
David Stern madly searches for the machete. It has vanished. Panicking, he vaults across the pit and slams into the creature, trying to knock it down. The creature grabs David and tries to gnaw on his neck but both of them lose traction on the filthy, blood-slick rug.
The enorm
ous cadaver falls on top of David Stern, its full weight knocking the breath from the older man’s lungs. David squirms and gasps and fights off the snapping jaws. Ash, Lilly, and Tommy are all on the other side of the pit, too far away to intercede immediately. David’s strength falters. He lets out a moan as his arms cramp, and the scorched, grimacing Spencer-Lee-thing on top of him gets closer and closer to his jugular.
The sound of a large-edged weapon thwacking into the back of the monster’s skull reaches David Stern’s ears one instant before the body on top of him goes completely flaccid, as limp as a dead fish. The creature collapses on top of David Stern, practically suffocating him in its malodorous girth. David grunts with great effort as he pushes the immense human remains off him.
The body rolls onto its side next to David, and the older man gasps for air. He sees his savior standing on the other side of him, the little person still gripping the massive machete in both her hands. The blade drips blood and black fluids, and Bethany Dupree looks a little stunned by her own actions.
“Okay … all right,” she utters, more to herself than anybody else. “I killed that thing pretty good.”
David Stern stares at the little eleven-year-old woman-child for a moment, catching his breath, and then lets out a spontaneous, nervous, hysterical laugh. “Thank you, sweetheart … that was … yes … that was … pretty good indeed.”
He rises up and pulls the girl into a desperate embrace, all his grief and pain and nervous energy and terror flowing out of him.
* * *
A moment later, Lilly Caul, on the other side of the pit, slides down the wall, collapsing in slow motion, holding her leg. The bite wound bleeds between her fingers. “Somebody get the machete,” she croaks in a thin, papery voice as she lands on her ass and holds pressure on the injury, her eyes hot and wide, scanning the pit for the machete.
The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury Page 25
