The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  “What in God’s name happened here?” Calvin asks from the narrow backseat, which is a tight fit for three adults. He is squeezed in between Meredith and Lilly, craning his neck to see through the window, while David rides shotgun, an AR-15 assault rifle propped tenuously between his legs.

  David stares out his window at the ruins. “Folks that tangled with the Governor burned it down as a sort of preemptive act.”

  “When did this happen?”

  David shrugs. “I don’t know—about a month ago, something like that.”

  “Who were these people?” Calvin asks almost rhetorically, shocked by the devastation.

  “Just people,” Lilly speaks up, rubbing her legs as though trying to get feeling into them. Her slender body is wedged against the rear door. The traumatic memories of the last month still flare up within her without much warning. Hap Abernathy’s death this morning has touched off her old feelings of panic. She feels like a fraud. Who the hell does she think she is? She tries to drive the doubt from her mind. Gazing out the window, she sees the scorched remains of biters on the ground, littering the property, and the sight of all those blackened corpses puts a squeeze on her midsection. There easily could be burned walkers still moving around inside these derelict buildings. She pulls out her Ruger, checks the clip, and says, “Regular people. Just like us. People just trying to survive.”

  Meredith, on the other side of the rear seat, fidgeting with nerves and adrenaline, at last speaks up. “You ask me, we’re never gonna find anything just circling in this flippin’ pickup … Gonna have to get out and search on foot at some point.”

  * * *

  After an hour of futile searching—each building either scoured clean by looters or burned beyond recognition by the blast—they find a narrow, low-slung Quonset hut in the far corner of the property, next to the parking garage. Either due to the steel exoskeleton, or the vagaries of the blast’s shockwave, the hut is still intact, padlocked from the outside.

  Bob breaks the lock with a ball-peen hammer, and the whole team pours into the darkness of the hut, which smells of machine oil and mold.

  Flashlights snap on. In the slender beams, huge crates are visible, stacked to the ceiling, covered with cobwebs. Block letters stenciled across the sides of the crates read UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE, 100 .50-CAL BROWNING ARMOR-PIERCING AMMUNITION, HIGH EXPLOSIVE COMPOSITION C, and 50 25MM HIGH-PERFOMANCE SIGNAL FLARES. Finally Bob’s flashlight beam pauses on one labeled INCENDIARY MUNITIONS/WHITE PHOS. “Son of a buck,” he utters under his breath.

  “What is it, Bob?” Lilly shines her light on the label. The words mean nothing to her.

  “I’ve heard about this shit,” he says, kneeling in front of the crate, blowing dust off the slats. “White phosphorous. Army used it in Kuwait.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nasty, nasty stuff. Like napalm only brighter and faster.”

  “Firebombs?”

  “Kinda.”

  “Didn’t we already try that?”

  “This stuff is different—believe me.” Bob looks over his shoulder at her. “Like fire on steroids.”

  She thinks about it for a second. “Can we use this stuff?”

  He gives her an enigmatic look and then turns to the others. “Somebody give me a hand, we need a dolly or something to carry all this stuff back to the truck.”

  * * *

  Late that afternoon, Lilly and the others return to Woodbury and find that Matthew, Speed, and Gloria have already beaten them back to town.

  Shaken, sweaty, and covered with soot, looking like they just narrowly escaped a coal-mining disaster, Matthew and company meet with Bob and Lilly in the infirmary, where Bob treats the team for minor burns and mild smoke inhalation, and Lilly questions them about the rate at which the herd is now closing in on Woodbury.

  “I’d say we have about twelve hours at the most,” Matthew says, sitting on the edge of a gurney, wiping grime off his face with a towel. Gloria and Speed sit across the room, sipping bottled water, looking bedraggled and haunted.

  Lilly paces and probes. “What the fuck happened? I’ve seen walkers get spooked by fire, recoil from it. Right? But nothing like this. What made them impervious to it?”

  Matthew shrugs and looks across the room at his comrades. “I’ll be damned if I know. It happened so quick I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at.”

  Speed pipes up. “It’s gotta be slowing them down—some, at least—but most of them, I don’t know, it’s like they don’t even fucking know they’re on fire.”

  This stops the conversation cold for a long moment, the ensuing silence excruciating.

  Lilly looks at Bob. “How long before we get that corner of the west wall beefed up?”

  “Should have it done by nightfall.” Bob clears his throat nervously. “I realize time is tight. I know we don’t have time for a proper burial service. But what if I went ahead and said a few words later, before we plant old Hap.” Bob sounds like he’s got a frog in his throat—he keeps clearing it—but Lilly knows he’s actually fighting tears. “He was a good old cuss. Saved a few lives in his day. I feel like we owe it to him. Whaddaya think?”

  “Of course, Bob.” Lilly studies his deeply lined face. His ancient eyes are buried in webbings of wrinkles. He has the tics and shakes of a dry drunk. For a fleeting instant, Lilly wonders if he might be close to falling off the wagon. She has no idea what she would do without this man. “As soon as we get the wall reinforced,” she says to him, “and we get everybody situated … we’ll meet in the square, and then bury him next to Penny.”

  Bob nods and casts his gaze at the floor, partly in gratitude, partly in shame. Nobody knows how bad he wants a drink right now.

  Across the room, Gloria takes her visor off, runs fingers through her thinning dishwater-gray hair. “You would think the fires would thin the herd eventually. Half them things were going up like Roman candles.” She looks at Lilly. “By the time they get here—with any luck—there ain’t gonna be many left.”

  Lilly nods and rubs her eyes. “What’s the old saying? From your lips to God’s ear?”

  “Speaking of God,” Speed says, “I saw that dude—that Jesus freak dude—working with y’all earlier, working the wall. Have they decided to hang around?”

  Lilly lets out a sigh. “I guess … I don’t know.” She thinks about it. “Calvin’s cool, by the way. He doesn’t impress me as a zealot or anything.” She thinks some more about the Dupree family. “Kids are sweet, too. It’s the wife I’m worried about. She’s really wired tight. I want everybody to keep an eye on her. She’s got that look about her—I’ve seen it before—she’s been out there too long. She wants to help with the explosives, but I’m not sure that’s a good idea. This lady is dangerous. I think she wants to single-handedly wipe this herd off the map.”

  After a long pause, Gloria comments softly, “Who doesn’t?”

  SIX

  Ten minutes before eight. Darkness setting in. Night crickets roaring. Something putrid on the wind. A distant humming noise like high-tension wires buzzing—or maybe an army of the dead closing in. Clock ticking. Each and every resident of Woodbury, Georgia, hustling to get things done before the deluge.

  Under the racetrack, Barbara Stern leads a gaggle of children ranging from ages three to twelve years old down a series of steps into the subterranean labyrinth of service bays. The yelping and barking hyena noises of the eight kids bounce off the tile walls of the central corridor as the middle-aged woman in the muumuu hurries toward the last office on the left. “Don’t push, Robbie,” Barbara admonishes one of the younger dervishes. “Take your fingers out of your mouth, Alyssa. Keep moving. Nathan, help your sister.”

  Barbara has only a vague memory of the service office. She saw it once while accompanying the Governor’s goons down here, and as she ushers the kids past battered garage door after battered garage door—each door drawn down and locked—she gets a queasy, uneasy feeling in her gut. Here is the place where
pit crews once repaired or stored their machines, where men in greasy coveralls futzed endlessly under the hoods and chassis of muscle cars, rolling around on dollies, ratcheting and hammering. But it is also the place where Philip Blake, aka the Governor, tortured his prisoners—the screams of the condemned blending with the shriek of drills and the laughter of the inquisitor—a place that became a real-life house of horrors. Barbara once saw a documentary on CNN about Saddam Hussein’s palace, raided and put under marshal law after the U.S. invasion. For some reason she remembers the creepily ordinary quality of that evil place—the photos of hunting trips on the refrigerator magnets and the porn on the bedside tables—and right now she is reminded of exactly that as she passes a pinup calendar on the wall showing a nude woman on a mechanical bucking bronco.

  “Last door on the left, Tommy,” she calls out to the boy in the lead.

  A miniature version of his father, Tommy Dupree is a wiry, fair-haired kid with a ruddy face that displays emotions readily, openly, his huge brown eyes full of intelligence and vigor. He looks like a little soldier right now in his denim overalls and Caterpillar cap as he marches toward the office, dragging his younger sister along by the neck of her sundress. From the moment she met the boy, Barbara felt an immediate kinship with the feisty twelve-year-old. Childless and unaccustomed to the insatiable neediness of most kids, Barbara resonates strongly with Tommy’s old soul. The boy is a pisser, a real wiseacre who suffers fools poorly, and Barbara identifies with that.

  “I’m not blind,” Tommy calls back to her. “I can see the sign.” Like a dog sitter herding puppies, he grabs the sleeves of his younger siblings and urges them toward a glass door marked PIT AND SERVICE ADMIN in faded stenciling. Five-year-old Lucas stumbles slightly in his corduroy jumper and saddle shoes, dropping a little knapsack full of papers on the stained floor.

  Coloring books flop open, crayons spilling across the floor, papers fluttering here and there. “I’ll get it, Luke, it’s okay, you go in,” Tommy comments sourly, but also with a trace of long-suffering patience in his voice, as though he has become a martyr—a parent by proxy—as he gathers up the contents of the knapsack.

  Barbara whisks the rest of the kids past Tommy and into the room.

  She returns a moment later to help the boy pick up the art supplies. Kneeling next to him, she stuffs errant crayons back into the sack while Tommy picks up individual sketches hastily drawn in black marker and pencil by the shaky hand of a five-year-old. One of them catches Barbara’s eye. “Not to be nosy,” she says to the twelve-year-old, “but who’s that supposed to be?”

  “Oh, this?” He holds the paper up, and Barbara gets a closer look at the strange misshapen humanoid figure with the horns, cadaverous face, and huge forked tongue flagging out of its fang-lined mouth. “That’s the Aunty-Christ.”

  “Really.”

  “Yep. My little brother has visions. Most of the time he sees visions of the Rupture. Or at least that’s what my dad calls it.”

  “The Rapture, you mean?”

  “Yep,” the boy says with a casual nod, putting the picture back in the knapsack. “My dad says we’re in the Triboolation times when some of us get lifted up into heaven and some of us have to stay behind and fight the Aunty-Christ. That’s where all these monsters come from. They’re signs of the Triboolation times.”

  “Oh.” Barbara cannot muster much of a response other than a tepid, “I see.”

  “I think it’s all bullshit,” the boy goes on. “But I don’t say anything, it would hurt my dad’s feelings. He’s not a bad father, he just gets so annoying sometimes with the Jesus talk and the praying and the God stuff.” He zips the knapsack and rises to his feet. “I’m an atheist myself. Don’t tell my mom and dad, though—it would kill them.”

  Barbara chuckles as she rises and ushers the boy into the office. “Now see, we have something in common. I’m not a Jew, but don’t tell David’s parents—it would kill them.”

  They close the door behind them, drawing the shade down, the sound of the latch slamming home echoing down the empty passageway.

  * * *

  In the hours before the first sighting, Lilly supervises the last-minute tasks required to fortify the town and prepare for the attack. She has six women and fourteen men working continuously on reinforcing the west wall, allocating ammunition, placing arc lamps, positioning the gunners, installing Matthew’s makeshift catapult, distributing explosives, and handing out equipment such as scopes, night-vision goggles, tracer bullets, flares, and ammo magazines. After scavenging what they could from the ruins of the Guard depot, and combining their private stashes, they have a grand total of sixteen live grenades, a few hundred .45-caliber rounds, about sixty .38-caliber rounds, a hundred and fifty high-velocity .30-caliber armor-piercing bullets, and about a hundred .22-caliber slugs in ten separate magazines for Lilly’s two Ruger pistols. It’s not a very impressive arsenal—especially considering the variables here—but they’ll have to make do. The explosive ordnance from the Guard depot could be their trump card. Lilly advises those with assault rifles to fire controlled bursts since the weapons will spray eight hundred rounds a minute if the trigger is continuously tripped.

  Around eleven o’clock that night, they pause to have a brief memorial ceremony in the square for Hap Abernathy. By torchlight, the twenty adults huddle in a semicircle around the stone statue of Jeb Stuart, heads bowed, as Bob stands before a pine box wrapped in rope and duct tape, speaking in low tones about Hap’s days shuttling middle-school kids to and from school in his yellow bus. Hap was a curmudgeon, but he was also well liked, and several survivors have stories they want to tell. Everybody gets a chance to speak, but the ceremony is short-lived, as the unmistakable odor of walkers begins to drift on the wind, an offense to the proceedings. Everybody gets jumpy when they detect a new aspect to the stench. Just beneath the telltale scent of rancid meat and festering shit, like a dissonant musical counterpoint, is the black, acrid, oily odor of charred flesh.

  The mourners disperse, taking their positions on the rooftops of cars and truck cabs parked along the barricade. Matthew sets his jerry-rigged catapult on the top bucket of a cherry picker near the west gate. A conglomeration of bungee cords, wooden dowels, and the guts of a wheelbarrow, the catapult features a slingshot apparatus that fires projectiles weighing up to ten pounds. Beside the catapult he piles a stack of C-4 explosive, bundles of dynamite, and one-pound squares of white phosphorous.

  Next to Matthew, on the bonnets of two semicabs, the self-proclaimed sharpshooters in town set up their equipment, including tripods, ear protection, sighting scopes, and metal boxes of high-velocity armor-piercing bullets. Ben learned long-distance target shooting back in ROTC at Vanderbilt and claims to be able to take down a head shot at a hundred and seventy-five yards. Lilly can’t decide whether she believes him, but it doesn’t matter. Somebody has to operate the M1 Garand rifle. The other sharpshooter is David Stern. With very little experience, as well as a bum right eye, he lacks Ben’s credentials but makes up for it with his even temper. David has impressed Lilly as being unflappable—a trait that goes a long way in the heat of battle.

  Sometime after midnight, Lilly decides to have one last powwow before the arrival of the herd. She gathers everybody by the trucks parked across the west gate. By this point the stench is unbearable, so pervasive it suggests that the herd is even bigger than they thought. But no one has yet sighted any walkers. The worst part, perhaps, is the unmistakable odor of burned meat. Lilly has never encountered any fatal house fires close up, or witnessed any deaths by immolation, but she has certainly smelled bacon grease burning in an iron skillet, a common result of her father Everett’s attempts at making breakfast. This odor smells like Everett’s burning bacon multiplied by a thousand, mixed with scorched animal fur and charred human hair. It keeps Lilly’s guts levitated throughout the last-minute pep talk.

  “Okay, so, here’s the deal,” she announces to the group in the wee-hour darkness. The
y have extinguished the emergency sodium-vapor lights, killing the generators and plunging everything into moonlit gloom, the resulting eerie silence broken only by the wind warbling over the distant humming of undead. The noise—growing and intensifying with agonizing slowness and certainty—sounds like a monsoon coming, like a squall building behind the trees. The faces gathered around Lilly reflect the cold moonlight and thinly veiled terror. “I want everybody to take your positions and don’t get too comfortable—obviously the herd’s gonna be here ahead of schedule.”

  “How do you know that?” Ben Buchholz wants to know, his gaunt face shaded by his John Deere cap. The other faces—Calvin, Meredith, Speed, Matthew, David, Gloria, and the rest of them—look on with intense, wide-eyed alertness. Adrenaline flows through the group like an electric current.

  “You smell that?” Lilly gives Ben a hard look. “Just take a whiff.”

  “All right, I get it,” Ben grumbles.

  “No matter what happens, stay at your positions.” Lilly scans the group. “Don’t stare at the herd, don’t get mesmerized, don’t pick out a single walker and waste ammo trying to take it down. Just fire controlled bursts toward the tops of the bodies.” Lilly pauses to let this sink in. The wind carries a chorus of moaning from the west. Lilly feels a shiver coming on but hides it. The clock ticks. Even though Lilly isn’t even remotely close to being an experienced leader, either military or otherwise, she finds the words coming out of her mouth now almost unbidden, innate, automatic. “I’ll be roving with the twenty-two-cal pistols and the walkie-talkie. Matthew will have the other radio. If something goes wrong, or if you see something you think needs to be addressed differently, then go ahead and—”