The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  The walkie-talkie sits on an oil drum fifteen feet away, and Lilly crosses the distance in a few leaping strides, snatching the two-way off the drum. She thumbs the Send button. “Matthew? Lilly here … go ahead.”

  The voice crackles: “Oh, Jesus … um … Lilly … something really … something really messed up has happened!”

  Lilly thumbs the switch: “Calm down, Matthew. Tell me what happened. Over.”

  The voice: “It’s my bad … I didn’t … didn’t see it coming … aww SHIT!”

  Lilly speaks up: “Matthew, take a breath. Is everybody all right? Did somebody get bit?”

  After a burst of static, the voice returns, breathless, hysterical, coughing: “We’re fine, we’re all okay … but the herd, Lilly, the goddamn fucking herd … we didn’t stop it. We just … made it worse.”

  Lilly transmits: “What are you talking about, Matthew? Did you do the fire line?”

  From the little speaker hisses the eerie sound of Matthew Hennesey’s humorless, hyperventilated laughter: “Oh we did it, all right … we lit the fucking place up.” Pause, a rustling noise, the sound of heavy breathing. “The problem is … surprise, surprise … these goddamn things are dead … they’re already fucking dead…!”

  Lilly listens to the voice deteriorating into more breathless laughter. She thumbs the button: “Matthew, listen to me. I need to know exactly what happened. Just calm the fuck down and tell me what happened.”

  After a long beat of crackling silence, Matthew Hennesey’s voice settles and drops an octave, like a child who’s been caught red-handed: “We lit the fire line … and … and … Jesus, I never would have dreamed … Lilly, they went right through it … like it wasn’t even there … The front row went up first … it was like some kind of fucked-up stunt … the walkers in front just lit up like candles … just burst into flames … the gasses from all the decaying flesh … I don’t know what it was … it was like each one erupted … and pretty soon the whole fucking herd was going up … It was like that old film of the Hindenburg blowing up … remember that? The fire just poured through the swarm … until pretty much every last one of them was blazing … They were blazing like walking torches, but Lilly … the thing is … they didn’t stop … they kept on … kept on trudging along like they didn’t even have a fucking clue they were burning.” He pauses to catch his breath. Lilly, still processing it, stares down at the hard gray earth, as powdery as moon dust. The sound of Matthew’s voice crackles again: “They’re still heading for Woodbury, Lilly.”

  Lilly squeezes the Send button: “Wait. Okay. Hold on. I don’t understand. Won’t the fire destroy them? Most of them? Or at least a good chunk?”

  The voice, now reduced to a low murmur, crackles and fizzes through the static: “Yeah … in time, I guess … some of them … I don’t know.” Dry, husky laughter again. “If the fire destroys the brain … or makes the body unable to walk … at this point, your guess is as good as mine … but there’s one thing I can tell you for sure … There’s so many of them, a good portion will make it to Woodbury by tomorrow morning … and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

  Lilly stares at her watch, thinking about it, slowly shaking her head. The fact is, nothing is pretty anymore.

  * * *

  “Shine your flashlights on the right side of the door—right there—yeah, perfect.” Bob crouches and muscles the claws of the hammer into the dusty, cracked mortar between two bricks, sending a shower of particles to the floor. He grunts with effort. “This brickwork is over a hundred years old if it’s a day,” he says, struggling with the hook, wedging it in and then prying as hard as he can.

  “Bob—”

  The door suddenly gives.

  Hap jerks back with a start. Too old to react quickly, too damn blind to see what’s happening, he gets bombarded with a series of impressions—the first of which is a cool draft of noxious air puffing out of the seam, as though the seal on a giant mason jar has just been broken. This is followed by the rasp of ancient hinges squeaking as Bob swings the door open, followed by a blur of movement.

  At first Hap identifies the thing that bursts out of the doorway as a raccoon. It’s dark and low to the ground, and in Hap’s bleary eyesight, the only thing that truly registers is a small mouth full of sharp yellow teeth. The thing clambers spiderlike across the floor toward Hap. He lets out a startled gasp as the creature clamps onto his right ankle and sinks its fangs into his flesh.

  Now things start happening very quickly—far too quickly for Hap to track—the worst of which is the hot pain that travels up his leg. He loses his balance and falls backward onto his ass, his penlight flying out of his hand and rolling across the floor. The light shines at the thing chewing his ankle.

  For one horrible instant before the other two men intercede, Hap stares into the face of a waking nightmare.

  The monster that has locked its jaws around his leg barely resembles anything that was ever human. Presumably the time it has spent in the darkness behind the door has desiccated it beyond recognition, its flesh earthworm-gray and so sunken around the angles of its skull and sternum as to look vacuum formed. Jagged, misshapen knots of bone protrude from the corners of its limbs, giving it a ghastly puppetlike appearance. Perhaps once a child or a dwarf, the miniature humanoid stares through luminous, lidless eyes as it gnaws at Hap’s arthritic joint, sucking the blood and marrow with the fervor of a starving castaway suckling the last drops of moisture from a coconut husk.

  Hap sees a flash, and the blast pops in his ears as Bob blows the thing away with a single head shot that sends gray shards of tissue stippling Hap’s face. Gasping for breath, holding his leg, Hap feels the monster release its grip and sag to the floor in a puddle of dark fluids. Hap moans—his ankle burning.

  Ben’s silhouette fills the doorway in the wall, his Glock up, gripped in both hands, aimed and ready, but only that gelid draft of toxic air puffs out of the darkness on the other side of the door. No movement, no sound, only the ringing in Hap’s ears as he lies back in agony, holding his aged, varicose-veined, rheumatoid shin, the warm wet life-blood seeping out of it, mingling with the rotten fluids spreading across that filthy concrete deck.

  “Okay, breathe, Old Hoss, just breathe,” Bob is saying now, kneeling by Hap, cradling his head. Hap blinks and sucks breaths against the tsunami of pain coursing over him. He tries to breathe. He tries to speak. He tries to focus on Bob, who continues to softly encourage. “Gonna be okay, gonna get you outta here.”

  “No … no you ain’t.” Hap has to marshal every last shred of energy to speak, to formulate words and sentences. The pain burrows into him, spreads through every capillary. Some people succumb slowly to the shock of a bite; for others it’s a matter of minutes. Hap feels his essence leaking out the bottom of his feet. “You ain’t moving me.”

  “Hap, shush now, we’re gonna—”

  Hap manages to shake his head. “No, you ain’t gonna move me because I’m … I’m done. I expected it to happen … s-sooner or later. It was a … good … good run I had in this world.”

  “Hap—”

  “F-finish it now.”

  “Hap, shut up—”

  “Bob,” Ben’s voice interrupts softly. “You know what you gotta do, there ain’t no—”

  “SHUT UP!” Bob bats away the sound of Ben’s voice behind him as though swatting at a wasp. He inspects the bite wound soaking Hap’s pant leg. Frantically, breathlessly, he puts his gun down and tears a hank of cloth from his shirttail, hurriedly making a tourniquet and winding it around the old man’s leg. “Now, don’t argue with me, Old Hoss. We’re gonna—”

  Hap gets his trembling fingers around the beavertail grip of Bob’s .357 pistol.

  Bob looks down.

  * * *

  It happens so abruptly, so quickly, that Bob has no time to prevent it, let alone even register what is occurring. He sees something move in the darkness beneath him and realizes that Hap’s crooked old fingers have wrapped around
the grip of the revolver. Bob shouts a garbled cry as Hap quickly turns the barrel around and presses it against his liver-spotted temple.

  Bob reaches for the gun at the same exact moment Hap squeezes the trigger.

  Another inarticulate shout from Bob as the blast rings out, flashing and roaring in the darkness. Bob rears back as Hap whiplashes, the back of his skull blowing off, the blood-mist spraying a load-bearing post behind him. Hap flops backward in a cloud of cordite, landing with his eyes pinned open. The gun clatters to the cement—a dark pool spreading.

  “NO! FUCK, NO!” Bob lurches toward his friend, acting on instinct. “FUCK! FUCK!” Bob tries to lift the old man’s head off the floor, the blood making Bob’s hands greasy. Hap slips back to the floor. Bob gibbers to himself as he feels the back of the man’s head, feels his neck for a pulse. “Fuck-fuck-fuck!” Bob’s eyes fill up and he can’t see very well as he pulls Hap’s lifeless body into an awkward bloody embrace. “Goddamn it, you stupid old fuck, what did you do? What did you do?”

  “Bob, c’mon.” Ben’s voice comes from the shadows behind Bob, sounding as though it’s coming from a million miles away. “Bob, he’s gone. He—”

  “SHUT THE FUCK UP, BEN!” The force with which Bob’s gravelly voice pours out of him takes even Bob by surprise, and the unexpected emotion welling up in him makes him dizzy. For some reason, this one hits him hard—this death, this senseless loss, as casual and sudden as a sneeze. He loved old Hap Abernathy, loved his stories, loved his curmudgeonly personality, loved his stubborn bullheadedness that reminded Bob of some of his old army buddies. Hap had done a stint in the navy back in the Korean War and had been a good cook, a typical swabbie, and he made Bob laugh. Now Bob feels the waterworks threatening as he hugs his friend’s limp body to his chest, the blood baptizing Bob in misery. He begins to weep softly.

  “It was his doing, Bob,” Ben’s voice murmurs from the darkness, only inches away now but coming from a great, great distance. “He was a good old soul, and he went out like a man.”

  “I could’ve … I could’ve … FUCK!” Bob puts his face down against the side of Hap’s ruined head. “I could’ve saved him.”

  “No, you couldn’t have.”

  “I could’ve … amputated it.”

  “No, Bob. There was nothing you could’ve done. He went out like a man.”

  Bob tries to say something else but instead closes his eyes and lets the rest of the crying jag travel through him. It takes a minute or so. Then Bob is silent, rocking the flaccid body back and forth. Then he stops rocking the body and just sits there, desolate, empty, drained. He looks up at Ben and says softly, “We’re gonna take his body back, give it a proper burial.”

  “Of course.”

  “C’mon … help me make a stretcher.”

  The two men gather scraps of wood and rope and packing tape.

  They fashion a crude conveyance on which to drag the body back to town. It takes another few minutes to secure Hap’s corpse on the stretcher, and when they’re done, and they’ve got the body tied down, and they’re wiping the sweat from their brows and preparing to leave, Bob takes one last look at the second body—the mangled cadaver on the floor with the desiccated flesh and the bones sticking out of every joint—and he spits at it.

  Then Bob notices something else: On the other side of that cadaver, behind that secret door in the basement wall, a tunnel stretches into the dark.

  Bob blinks, wipes his eyes, and stares at the tunnel for a long moment. The passageway is lined with bricks and mortar, and from the condition of the lining it appears to have been hastily constructed many, many years ago. It seems to extend into the darkness for hundreds of yards, maybe even miles.

  In fact, the more Bob gazes at it, the more an invisible hook sinks into the deepest recesses of his brain: Who the fuck built this thing, and why did they build it, and most important, how far does it go?

  At last Bob turns to Ben and says in a drained, exhausted voice, “Let’s get out of here.”

  FIVE

  Calvin Dupree bursts into the administrative office on the second floor of the courthouse building with his heart racing and mouth dry with panic. He pauses just inside the door and quickly scans the anteroom, which Lilly has offered to his family as temporary quarters until they are healed up enough to leave. Illuminated by a single skylight, the space has been swept, the desks and filing cabinets pushed against one wall, and the boarded windows hung with moth-eaten drapes.

  Now the children sit morosely on one side of the room, mostly keeping to themselves. Bethany sits in a shopworn swivel chair, reading a dog-eared storybook, while Tommy and Lucas sit facing each other on the floor, playing a board game.

  “Darlin’?” Calvin calls to Meredith, who sits alone on the other side of the room, staring out a crack in one of the boarded windows, rocking gently on a folding chair, silently mouthing her obsessive-compulsive litany—some of it garbled and inaudible, some of it the phrases ‘don’t you’ and ‘say a word’—as the world goes on unabated around her. “Sweetheart, everything okay?” Calvin says as he approaches, clenching his fists nervously.

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “Darlin’?” Calvin kneels down next to her. “Talk to me—what’s wrong?”

  Still nothing but that disturbing silent mouthing of some talismanic prayer.

  “Listen, sweetie. Remember I told you about that herd forming west of here? Well, they tried to stop it and something went wrong. It’s still heading this way. We have to stay here now. We’re safer within the walls of this place. At least for the time being. Do you understand?”

  She doesn’t look at him, doesn’t respond, simply continues murmuring to herself, softly humming off-key, as a thin shard of light leaks through the boarded window and strikes her face, making her narrow, sculpted features look even more severe than usual. Barely a whisper, more of a moan than a song, her voice sounds as though it’s coming from the bottom of a well as she utters the words to an old lullaby: “Hush, little baby don’t say a word … Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

  Calvin realizes this is what she’s been mumbling for days, maybe weeks. He touches her shoulder. “Darlin’? Did you hear what I said?”

  All at once, she pulls away from his touch as though from an electrical shock. She looks up at him, blinking, scowling. “I heard what you said, Calvin, I’m not comatose!” She frowns. “What happened with the herd?”

  “What?” He cocks his head. “Oh. I don’t know. They tried to block its path but it backfired somehow.” He tenderly strokes her arm. “We’ll be okay. Don’t worry.” He squeezes her arm. “Why don’t we pray on it? What do you say? Let’s pray together.” He bows his head. “Lord Jesus, please hear our prayer—”

  From behind him, a quavering voice interrupts: “Can you please do something other than pray all the time?”

  Calvin whirls around and sees his eldest son, Tommy, standing with clenched fists, sweat-soaked hoodie, and veins bulging in his skinny neck. He is a boy on the brink—of adolescence, of violence, of tears. “Mom’s totally gone crazy, totally sick in the head, and all you can do is pray?”

  “You hold your tongue!” Calvin feels anger flare in his gut. The boy has a way of pushing buttons, and Calvin has a lot of buttons lately. “We are dealing with a life-and-death situation here.”

  “I know, Dad. That’s the problem. You can’t protect us with prayers.”

  “Go sit down! Right now!”

  “But Dad—”

  “Now!”

  The boy lets out an enraged groan, spins, and storms back across the room. He kicks the board game across the floor, startling his younger brother.

  Calvin turns back to his wife. “It’s gonna be okay, I promise,” he says to her, gently stroking her arm.

  She pulls away again. “Your son’s right, Calvin.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Your wife’s a mental defective.”

  “Meredith—”
<
br />   “Nuttier than a soup sandwich.”

  “Stop it!”

  “YOU STOP!” The sheer volume and timbre of her voice startles everyone in the room. The kids abruptly look up from their scattered game pieces. Meredith’s slender face has turned livid, the cords in her neck pulsing. “Stop pretending you can pray your way out of this, and stop pretending everything is peachy keen with this family, and stop pretending this is not the End Days and we’re not all screwed!”

  “Okay, that’s enough—” He goes to touch her again, and she slaps his hand away.

  “And stop lying to me!”

  He looks at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Tommy heard you were going out to that National Guard depot later today to help these people look for weapons. Is that true?”

  “Okay, that’s not—”

  “IS IT TRUE OR NOT?”

  He nods. “Yes, it’s true.”

  She takes a deep breath, her eyes glassy with rage and madness. “I’m going with you.”

  “Meredith—”

  She looks up at him with the strangest mixture of emotions twisting her features: anguish, desolation, sorrow, but mostly white-hot anger. “I’m not going to curl up in a ball and die. Not without a fight. I want to destroy these monsters as much as anybody else. I’m going with you.”

  * * *

  The ashes of the former National Guard Depot Number Eighteen encompass a ten-acre plateau of scrubland overlooking Elkins Creek—about a mile and a half east of Woodbury. A narrow access road of sun-bleached pavement splits off from Highway 18 and winds up the west slope to the front gate, which now resembles a charred skeleton of mangled iron bones torn asunder by the shockwaves of a firebomb.

  As Bob pulls the rust-pocked Dodge Ram up to the blasted wreckage of the entrance, the rest of the passengers silently take in the vast ruins of the property. What was once a fortress of chained-link, thick-walled buildings and heavily guarded armories now resembles a child’s discarded play set, the toys scattered across the razed landscape. Tanks lie scorched and upended like dead tortoises in the distance. Burned-out shells of Humvees and Bradley battle vehicles sit strewn across the lot. Half the buildings are missing doors and windows, some of them with entire floors gaping open, ravaged by fire and now exposed to the elements. The crater at the epicenter of the explosion that destroyed the depot now resembles a brackish pond filled with toxic rainwater, the blast radius still apparent to the naked eye in great concentric rings of soot radiating across the pavement.