The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  At the same time, Ash has grabbed a cardboard lid to one of the games, and she’s now lunging across the floor to the spot where Lilly sits grimacing, holding pressure on her ankle. Ash crouches next to her. “Gonna tie it off,” Ash says in her tense, flat, cold New England accent.

  She tears her sleeveless blouse off, revealing her emaciated midriff and bra. Ripping the shirt in half, she quickly wraps the fabric around the wound as tightly as possible. She ties a knot, and then rolls the cardboard into a tube, which she slides under the knot.

  In the meantime, Tommy rushes over to Spencer-Lee’s remains and starts rifling through his pockets. Behind him, the other children back away, awed by Tommy’s mettle and bravery in the face of his own imminent demise. Tommy finds a pocketknife, a crumpled pack of Marlboro Reds, a Bic lighter, a metal flask half-full of unidentified alcohol, and small .38-caliber pistol shoved down the back of the belt. Tommy turns to David Stern and hands over the lighter and the flask. Then Tommy opens the revolver’s cylinder and looks in, his eyes widening, his pupils dilating with panic: one bullet remains tucked into a single chamber.

  Tommy turns and scuttles over to where Lilly sits in a daze of pain on the crater floor as Ash works on her improvised field dressing. “You’re gonna make it, Lilly,” Tommy says.

  “Tommy, not now!”

  “You’re gonna make it,” he says to her again. “We’re gonna get to your bite early enough.” He shows her the gun. “There’s one bullet left in this, though … which is gonna be for me.”

  “Tommy, please shut up!”

  Ash has begun to rotate the cardboard under the knot of the bandage, tightening the fabric of the field tourniquet to the point of cutting off Lilly’s circulation. Lilly grunts, wincing at the pressure.

  Tommy watches. “You have to do me this one last favor, Lilly,” he says, his tears tracking down his pale face like rivulets of scalding-hot mercury.

  “Shut up!—SHUT UP!”

  By this point, Norma has located the machete, and David has ordered the children to turn around again, and not look, and hold their hands over their ears. Gripping the flask of alcohol in one hand and the lighter in another, David tries to hold in his emotions. His voice has deteriorated, seething with terror. His words come out garbled as he tells the kids, “It’ll all be over in a … in just a sec … don’t worry … it’s … it’s gonna be okay.”

  Above them, night has fallen like a funeral pall pulled down over the crater. The cool evening air vibrates with the collective rasp of the swarm, hundreds of them emerging from every quarter, drawn by the noise and voices, their iridescent eyes like reflectors floating over the edges of the pit, some of them shoving, nudging others against the barbed-wire barrier.

  Ash looks up at Norma, who approaches awkwardly, holding the machete. “I can’t do it, Ash,” Norma says, “I’m sorry, you gotta get somebody else to do it.”

  “Give it to me!” Ash grabs the machete out of Norma’s hand. Breathing hard, swallowing her dread, Ash tightens her sweaty grip on the handle. With her free hand, she pulls Lilly’s left leg toward her, exposing the wounded area. She clenches her teeth. She starts breathing harder and harder, as though she’s about to hyperventilate. She looks at Lilly’s sweat-slick face.

  Lilly nods.

  David moves in with the flask and a lantern, which he has kindled to life, the only light in the pit. The pale yellow radiance illuminates the wall of the crater like a footlight in a nightmarish stage show.

  Ash just keeps breathing harder and harder until it begins to dawn on everyone that Ash is also having difficulty completing the procedure. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s Lilly Caul she’s about to chop and quarter, their beloved de facto leader, their north star, their protector, their voice of reason.

  “Do it, goddamn it!” Lilly’s cry has a razor’s edge of hysteria in it. “C’mon, do it—you’re torturing me! JUST FUCKING DO IT!”

  Tommy puts his arm around Lilly and says very softly, “I’ll do it, Lilly.” Their eyes meet, the flickering flame painting the boy’s face with golden light. In a single heartbeat, something very profound—which nobody present that evening will ever be able to articulate—passes between the two of them. “I’ll do it if you promise me one thing,” he says. “You’ll use that last bullet on me.”

  “God, no … Tommy, please … please don’t ask me to do that.” Lilly’s moaning whisper is barely audible, her voice gone, her heart broken, dizziness washing over her. She puts her face into the soft part of Tommy’s shoulder, and she lets out all of her pent-up sorrow, grief, and desolation. She sobs out loud, her voice taking on the quality of a wounded animal. She hugs her adopted son to her breast for what feels like the first time and the last time. “No … no, no, no … God no, no, no.”

  “I love you,” he murmurs into her ear, softly, ensuring that she’s the only one who will hear this one last word. “Mom.”

  * * *

  In that one transcendent instant, Lilly knows in the deepest chambers of her heart that everything will be measured as either before or after this moment. “My sweet, sweet son,” she utters almost inaudibly into Tommy’s ear, as the waves of pain finally engulf her and drown her, pulling her down into a void of unconsciousness.

  She collapses into a fetal ball next to the boy, her wounded leg still throbbing, still protruding awkwardly across the ground. She feels now as though she’s coming apart at the seams, her temperature spiking, her spirit disconnecting from her body as a yolk might separate from the white, floating, drifting through a sea of agony, a wraith that has slipped free of its corporeal self.

  She doesn’t see Tommy Dupree painfully rise up and take the machete from Ash. She doesn’t see him wobbling on weak knees, dizzy and faint as though drunk with sorrow, as he grips the machete with both hands. She doesn’t see his tears shimmering on his porcelain face as he raises the blade. Nor does she hear his grunt of effort as he brings the machete down as hard and fast as possible.

  The sonic boom of agony resonates through her body, sending her further into the vacuum of space. She stiffens as the ankle breaks—the snap of cartilage and bone, like a piece of her soul torn away by banshees—followed by the dousing of alcohol, cold and wet on her, the snap of a flint, and the eruption of cleansing fire. The inferno builds and chews through her marrow, a tidal wave of molten-hot pain crashing against her, sending her further into darkness. She can faintly smell the odor of her own burning flesh right before the black tide pours over her, and everything goes silent and dark.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Miraculously, some time later—minutes or maybe hours, she will never know for sure—her nervous system awakens with a start at the sound of a .38-caliber short-barreled pistol firing in the echo chamber of the crater.

  The booming report sparks and spangles the darkness like Roman candles across the insides of Lilly’s eyelids, illuminating the delicate radiant capillaries of her flesh like myriad rivers branching across miniature maps. She manages to peer through the slits of her lids and sees the woman named Ash hunched over the body of the boy, the gun smoke from a single blast a nimbus around their bodies, cocooning them in its steel-blue haze.

  Lilly opens her mouth to scream but no sound comes out. She sinks back into the eternal, merciful darkness. Please, God … let it be a dream.

  Later yet, in the wee-hour limbo, her eyelids flutter open again for a single instant to reveal the chaos in the pit, a syrupy slow-motion struggle unfolding before her, partially glimpsed in the flicker of lantern light.

  From the darkness above them, the swarm has toppled the concertina-wire barrier inward to the breaking point. Now a single walker plunges into the pit. The stalwart, tenacious Ashley Duart—shirtless, in her bra—stabs the creature through the skull with the long-bladed machete. Then comes another, arms pinwheeling, plummeting into the hole, the machete instantly shutting it down. Then another corpse plunges, flailing, and then another, and another, and Ash greets them with a quick and decisiv
e skewering. Norma and David and Bethany are each pitching in now, stabbing edged weapons into the crania of the monsters until the human remains begin to accumulate across the grimy floor of the pit like the aftermath of a battlefield.

  Lilly tries to move, tries to crawl, tries to go and help them, but her body—wracked with agony, her entire left leg numb to the point of paralysis—will not function. Does she feel a phantom left foot? She gets a faint whiff of burned flesh. Or is it the death-stench of the mounting clutter of bodies?

  Wavering in and out of consciousness, Lilly catches her last bleary glimpses of walkers tumbling into the hole, her people frantically putting them down in the fashion of a grisly assembly line. Off to the side, the children watch with stoical, empty expressions like the offspring of pig farmers observing the autumn slaughter.

  The scene begins to fade, the noise diminishing. Lilly woozily glances to her right and sees the mangled, bloody remnants of her severed left foot. It lies nestled in a blood-soaked cloth, as pale as a marzipan mold. In her weakening state, semiconscious now, sliding back down the greased chute of oblivion, she finds morbid humor in the fact that even in the low flickering lantern light she can see the toes of her amputated appendage still have flaked and streaked evidence of the ineptly applied pink polish she put on back in Atlanta a few weeks ago in a vain attempt at normalcy.

  Then she sees another object just beyond her pitiful disembodied foot, and her amusement evaporates. She stares at the slender body partially covered in a blanket as the shade slowly draws down on her vision. Tommy Dupree’s remains lie on their side, his legs drawn up against his chest, his arms folded inward as though he is sleeping. The entrance wound in his head is barely visible, and he has a strangely tranquil expression on his face.

  It’s as though a fist has come out of the darkness and punched Lilly in the gut. She curls into a tight, helpless fetal position and silently sobs, her tears seeping down into the gritty, filthy rug beneath her as the world finally fades back to nothingness.

  * * *

  The rest of that night, the others sleep very little, engulfed in absolute darkness and the horrible stench of dead flesh, surrounded by countless ragged heaps of human remains. The children toss and turn, gripped in fragments of never-ending serial nightmares that have tormented them for the last four years. Ash sits slumped against one wall in her bra, a blanket draped over her shoulders, her head lolling every few moments as she drifts in and out of restless half-sleep.

  David Stern lies next to Lilly, keeping an eye on her, intermittently thumbing the Bic lighter to check the makeshift dressing wrapped around the oozing stump where her foot used to be. He has nodded off a few times, snoring so loudly he wakes himself back up to once again flick the lighter on. In the dim yellow light, he sees Lilly’s eyes moving fitfully back and forth under her eyelids. He figures she’s having one doozy of a dream.

  Norma Sutters, sitting against the wall on the other side of Lilly, is the only one who doesn’t get a wink of sleep that night. She has an idea brewing in the back of her mind, and she wants to give it plenty of thought before she shares it with the others. Now, she waits for the ubiquitous droning chorus of gurgling, vibrating, dead vocal cords to fade away above her. The swarm has been dispersing for the last hour or so, the noise gradually dwindling. She can hear the awkward shuffling as the creatures lose interest in the contents of the pit and wander back toward the nooks and crannies from which they had come.

  The sky starts to change as dawn approaches. Norma is the first to notice it. She’s been gazing up at the stars all night, turning the idea over and over in her mind, and now she sees the first hint of the new day as the constellations begin to fade back into the hazy, ashy fabric of the night sky. She looks around the pit. The darkness has transformed ever so slightly like coffee with a hint of milk in it. Her heart begins to beat faster. It’s time to test the idea—perhaps their only chance of getting out of this godforsaken hole alive.

  She goes over to Ash and nudges the woman awake. “Ash, honey, it’s almost morning.”

  Ash sits forward with a jerk. She blinks, her eyes glittering with the residue of unspeakable violence. “What?!—fuck! Sorry.”

  “It’s me, sweetie, it’s Norma.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Not sure but the light’s coming up, it’s gotta be four thirty, five … something like that.”

  “Jesus … for a second there I thought it was all a fucking dream.”

  “You and me both, girlfriend.” The pale glow of predawn has risen enough now for Norma to see the younger woman’s features. Her angular cheeks and patrician nose have seemingly aged many years in one night. Her dark hair looks as though it has turned gray, but Norma quickly realizes it’s simply a trick of the light. “You and me both.”

  * * *

  The day dawns gray and foggy, a cold front crashing up against the humidity and heat of the Georgia summer, making the sky vanish behind a ceiling of gunmetal haze and giving everything a dreamlike cast. The occupants of the pit work in silence, careful not to attract any unwanted attention, while they gradually, laboriously transform the configuration of the objects strewn across the three hundred or so gruesome square feet of carnage.

  The jostling shakes Lilly out of a near-catatonic stupor, the passage of time having become meaningless to her, the surreal narrative of her fever dreams deteriorating into lurid, cryptic imagery. As Ash and David gently lift her onto an improvised stretcher made from a collapsed lawn chair, she manages to open her eyes, just slightly, her eyelids feeling as though they weigh a thousand pounds apiece. She feels the stretcher tilt as they lift her onto the pile of human remains. She can’t see the results of Norma and David’s idea—piling up all those corpses by hand, one at a time, as though building an immense anthill of cadavers—nor can Lilly grasp the enormity of the accomplishment. But she does feel—even amidst the relentless, crippling pain radiating through her from the stump of her phantom left foot—the exhilaration of being resurrected from that massive tomb up a staircase made out of dead bodies.

  For most of that morning, stacking one body at a time, they had built the mound of corpses. A couple of times the pile collapsed on them like a house of cards or a heap of charcoal briquettes toppling. A few of them vomited from the smell and the slime of rancid blood and fluids soaking their clothes. But they kept at it, kept tossing body after body on the pile, until the mound rose nearly thirty feet high.

  Now they pull Lilly up and over the ledge, setting her down on the pavement of Main Street. The breeze blows through her damp, matted hair, stirring her, reaching down into her soul. That breeze—that patented magnolia-scented Woodbury breeze—it rouses her further. It feels like freedom, like hope, like wistful memories. Norma and the children stand around Lilly in a semicircle, clutching each other’s hands as directed by Ash. Lilly tries to say something but hasn’t the strength.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Ash and David lifting one last individual from the pit. They haul Tommy’s body out on a second jury-rigged stretcher and give Norma a nod. The tears and the waves of pain obscure Lilly’s vision, preventing her from seeing Bethany and Norma silently carrying the boy’s body down Dromedary Street toward the speedway complex.

  Lilly’s tears blur the sight of the fogbound town as the group proceeds north, following Norma and Bethany toward the racetrack arena. They pass the bombed-out ruins of the old post office and the ancient live oak that sits like a mythical sentry in front of the burned-out shell of the old Baptist church. Their methodical movements, their careful, measured steps—even the way the children are not making a peep—give the procession an air of mourning, of ritual, of commemoration.

  Closing her eyes Lilly tries to block out the pain, and think of Tommy and his life force and his love. She can feel the presence of the horde lurking just out of sight, behind the derelict Piggly Wiggly, down in the gulleys and dry creek beds of Simmons’ Woods, behind the billboards out near the highway, an
d within every shadow and underneath every rock in town. They mill about, aimlessly waiting, waiting for a signal, a scent, a sound.

  Lilly concentrates on the smell of the breeze as they approach the safety of the speedway. Twenty yards left and they’re home free. Twenty yards and Lilly will get medical attention. Twenty more yards and the children can breathe out again.

  Fifteen …

  Lilly focuses on that sweet, musky floral scent of the Woodbury wind.

  Ten yards to go …

  Lilly thinks of Tommy, and the fact that he will never smell this breeze again.

  Five yards …

  In her traumatized, tormented stream of consciousness, at that moment, Lilly imagines putting Tommy to bed, pulling the covers up to his chin, kissing him on the forehead, smelling the grassy, earthy scent of his hair, and telling him how much she loves him.

  Then she imagines Tommy Dupree falling fast asleep … just as the town of Woodbury now slumbers in its deep, abiding silence.

  Then, she and the others pass through the arena’s portal, and into the shadowy warren of safe passageways and secure rooms.

  EPILOGUE

  Los Primeros Dias

  A bridge of silver wings stretches from the dead ashes of an unforgiving nightmare to the jeweled vision of a life started anew.

  —Aberjhani,

  Journey Through the Power of the Rainbow

  To this day, the airless, musty, subterranean room repurposed as a makeshift infirmary survives. Through the brutal reign of Major Gene Gavin and his National Guard henchmen … through the savage days of Philip Blake, aka the Governor … through the violent infiltration of Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz and his flock of zealots … and through countless invasions of the dead, attacks by roving bandits, and even David Stern’s recent scorched earth conflagrations … Woodbury’s sole medical clinic, lab, intensive care unit, and maternity ward remains essentially the same as it had been the day the irrepressible Doc Stevens first turned it into just such a facility. That was back when the plague had been young—only weeks after the first incident of the dead attacking the living—and people considered facilities such as this truly temporary. Now folks aren’t so sure anymore. Nobody knows whether this nightmarish state of siege will ever end. All of which is why David Stern has become the unofficial head of the clinic, as well as self-taught practitioner, neophyte field surgeon, and amateur physical therapist.