The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  “Lilly!”

  The voice calling out her name—familiar and raspy and whiskey cured—interrupts her spiel in a sort of Shakespearean stage whisper.

  “What is it, Bob?” The older man is kneeling on the crown of a semitruck, the binoculars in his hand at his side, his chiseled features creased with nervous tension in the darkness. He looks as though he has just witnessed a deadly accident.

  “You gotta see this,” he says, holding up the binoculars, teeth gritted, struggling to hide his terror for fear of alarming the others.

  “Everybody take your positions!” Lilly calls out over her shoulder as she darts toward the cab. She climbs the service ladder two rungs at a time and reaches Bob’s perch within seconds.

  “Just on the edge of the trees,” he says with a sort of grim finality, handing over the binoculars.

  “Oh, Jesus.” Lilly sees exactly what he’s talking about. “Bob, I’m going to need you to fire off a few signal flares.”

  * * *

  The common wisdom among plague survivors is that a herd is the personification of Armageddon—the ten plagues of Egypt wrapped up in a single wave of rotting flesh and gnashing black fangs—and its presence spells doom for any living creature within miles. Lilly has seen a few of them firsthand—each one living on in her nightmares—but up until now they have been, if nothing else, consistent in their behavior patterns. Up until this moment, all herds have behaved in an almost identical fashion—a uniform flock of walkers crowded together and moving as one, pushing ever forward, a reeking flood tide of cadavers migrating lemminglike toward some inchoate destination. Eventually all herds have dissipated either in time or after a natural obstruction impeded their progress. But this—this abomination emerging from the tree line west of Woodbury at one fifty-three A.M. Eastern Standard Time and starting across the litter-strewn vacant lot adjacent to the railroad tracks—defies analysis, transcends past performance, and boggles the mind of anyone still breathing who lays eyes on it.

  Three flares in quick succession arc over the meadow, flickering magnesium daylight down on the horror.

  Lilly attempts to comment as she peers through the binoculars, but no words will formulate themselves, no salient thought will coalesce in her mind, and all she manages to do is gape and move her mouth in an approximation of words. But no words will come. Her flesh rashes with icy goose bumps, her sacrum tingling with horror, her scalp crawling with a million pinpricks. She stares. The herd has pushed out into the open now and is fully visible in the cold radiance of the flares.

  At roughly two hundred and fifty yards, the front line can be seen with the naked eye, writhed in a vast low-hanging haze of smoke, but only those with binoculars can truly behold what is coming this way. Scores and scores—perhaps hundreds—of burned corpses shamble in formation toward the town. Still smoldering, their eyes like cinders, their tattered clothing fused to their charred skin, they shuffle as one reanimated army of burn victims—as though a nuclear holocaust has swept through their rank and left behind only ghostly husks in its wake—now propelled by the invisible puppet strings of their ceaseless, relentless, insatiable instinct. A few of them crunch and crackle as they lumber along, as though they’re about to crumble apart at any moment. Others in the back rows still burn slightly, the winnowing flames curling up from their hairless skulls and mingling with the miasma of smoke and stench that now hangs like a storm cloud over the meadow. The odor emanating off the horde is practically indescribable—a mixture of rubbery, burning-chemical fumes, scorched proteins, and acrid, greasy, bitter tar bubbling off a hot skillet. The stench permeates the air and makes Lilly cough even as she stands paralyzed by the sight of it all.

  Gaping, staring, she presses the binoculars so tightly against her eye sockets that they shoot pain down the bridge of her nose. Her free hand instinctively moves down to the miniholster on the corner of her left hip and clasps the grip of her .22. She feels the killer instinct rise within her. She feels her mouth watering with both nausea and latent violence.

  In that awful instant before the first shots ring out, Lilly feels a sudden, unexpected, and overwhelming wave of sorrow coursing over her. The effect of this vast army of immolated corpses—somewhat reduced in number from the original superherd—is different from the standard swarm of rotting reanimated cadavers. The flames propelled by the methane and rot and degradations of flesh have blasted away all remnants of individuality. No longer can an onlooker make out the distinctions among the walkers—a former nurse, an auto mechanic, a child, a housewife, a farmer. Now there is no delineation among the burned, only a great mass of blackened, smoldering revenants shuffling endlessly forward, moving without purpose, without hope, without God or mercy or logic, simply moving.

  Lilly jumps as the first bark of a sniper rifle flashes in the darkness to her left.

  Through the binoculars she sees one of the lead corpses whiplash in a puff of smoke and blood-mist, then fold to the ground—a crisp pile of scorched remains for the buzzards—as its brethren slowly and obliviously trample it as they continue in their dog-whistle march across the field. More shots ring out from the platforms to Lilly’s left and right, and more charred cadavers pop their corks and collapse in fountains of sparks. The gunfire snaps Lilly out of her daze, and she lowers the binocs and draws her Ruger and grabs the walkie-talkie off her belt.

  Thumbing the switch, she yells, “Matthew, I want to hold off on the incendiaries until they’re close enough to do damage! Do you understand? Matthew? Tell me you understand! Matthew, do you copy?”

  Through crackling static, Matthew’s voice: “Copy that! One question, though!”

  Lilly thumbs the button. “Go ahead!”

  The voice: “Did you take the big boys?”

  Into the mouthpiece, Lilly says, “What? Did I take what?”

  Through the tiny speaker: “The big bundles of dynamite. They’re missing!”

  “What do you mean, they’re missing?!”

  Matthew’s voice: “They’re not fucking here—what the fuck happened to them?”

  Lilly glances over her shoulder at the cherry picker fifty yards away. In the darkness she can see Matthew’s hunched form rifling through the canisters of explosives and stacks of phosphorous. Lilly is only partially aware of the implications—her mind swimming, sparking with adrenaline in the darkness. She quickly turns back to the slow-motion onslaught.

  Already the herd has made significant progress across the meadow.

  It is now a hundred and fifty yards away, the odor as thick as a pall.

  “Okay, everybody, fire at will!” She thumbs back the hammer on the Ruger. “FIRE AT WILL! FIRE AT WILL! FIRE AT WILL!”

  * * *

  Crouched on the roof of a semitruck next to the cherry picker, Calvin hears Lilly’s voice cutting through the crackle of gunfire just as he reaches for his .357 Magnum.

  The gun, given to him by Bob Stookey, weighs a ton and feels awkward in his hand. He’s not a sportsman, not former military, not a gun guy—although the small Kentucky town in which he was born and raised was a haven for gun nuts. But now, with the advent of the Tribulations, he has forced himself to learn firearms.

  He brings the front sight up and draws a bead on a reanimated bundle of scorched flesh shuffling along in a halo of smoke about a hundred yards away. He fires. The roar makes his ears ring, and the recoil jerks his shoulder blade as he sees the walker stumble but not go down. The blast has taken a chunk of burned flesh from the creature’s ribs, leaving a gaping hole through which the moonlight shines in a beam of smoke and swirling dust, but it’s not enough to destroy the thing, and Calvin sniffs back his frustration.

  He senses something wrong. “Mer? Darlin’?” he calls down to Meredith.

  She had been standing down below, next to the cab, only a second ago. Calvin had talked her into wearing his thick leather jacket, high boots, gloves, duct tape around her wrists, and a couple of shemagh-style scarves around her neck, just in case—God forbi
d—she got too close to a walker. Only a minute ago Meredith had been complaining about the stiffness of the get-up, handing spare ammunition up to Calvin, grumbling that she should have a gun, too.

  Now she’s gone.

  “Oh, no,” Calvin utters under his breath. He turns and scans the shadows inside the barricade, gazes up and down the west wall, and sees only the other men and women blasting away at the oncoming horde. Muzzle flashes spark in the darkness, turning all movement into the surreal slow-motion of a silent movie. “MEREDITH!”

  Calvin quickly descends the cab’s emergency ladder. He drops to the ground and runs north through the darkness with his .357 still gripped in his right hand.

  “MEREDITH!”

  He stops at the end of the barricade, where the wall meets Canyon Road. Heart racing, he turns in a circle, racking his brain to come up with an answer. She could have returned to the underground tunnels beneath the racetrack to be with the kids. But why wouldn’t she tell him? It wasn’t like Meredith just to vanish without saying anything. His mouth goes dry with panic, his flesh crawling. Something is very, very wrong. He hears the first charge of explosives going up across the meadow, launched by Matthew’s catapult, and the sonic boom makes him practically jump out of his skin.

  For a brief instant, the darkness turns to day as Calvin screams, “MMMMEEERREDITH!”

  * * *

  On the far northwest corner of the barricade, behind the gargantuan old oak tree that has stood for over a century at this lonely street corner, Meredith Dupree wrestles with a padlock. Nobody sees her. At this end of town, all the power is down and all the streetlights are out, and the only illumination comes from either moonlight or the flicker of distant gunfire and explosives, so she has plenty of time.

  She works in the darkness, humming her lullaby and gazing through tears as she tries to wrest the lock off the handle of a screen door pilfered from the nearby Walmart. The door is reinforced with burglar mesh and hastily nailed up between a narrow gap in the seven-foot-high wall. It is a remnant of the old order—the Governor’s men put the door in a year earlier for quick emergency egress—and now it has rusted and burned and practically fused to the wall panels.

  Meredith’s hands do not shake as she works, despite the fact that she can hear her husband calling out for her above the gunfire and explosions. She keeps her attention focused on the door. She works at the padlock with a crowbar she found last night in the toolshed behind the deserted railroad depot. She’s not a strong woman—broad in the hips but flat-chested and scrawny in the upper body—however, considering the momentous nature of the occasion, she puts everything she has into the bar and finally it snaps the lock.

  The padlock falls to the ground with a faint thud. She drops the crowbar and tries to push the door open, but it sticks. She kicks it with the heel of her boot—once, twice, three times—until the screen finally detaches and the door rasps open.

  For a moment, she is virtually paralyzed by the wide-open darkness on the other side of the door—the landscape at night unexpectedly beautiful—and she just stands there staring for a long beat.

  Then she picks up her satchel, takes a deep breath, and lugs the heavy cargo through the doorway and into the flickering night.

  PART 2

  The Labyrinth

  No one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard, keep awake. For you do not know when the time will come.

  —Mark 13:32

  SEVEN

  Outside Woodbury’s barricade, beyond the derelict post office, You-Save-It Pharmacy, and rows of modest aluminum-sided buildings lining Jones Mill Road, lie the thick pecan groves and tree-lined paths of Nolan Woods. At this time of night, with the sky this clear and the moonlight this bright, the landscape turns almost primordial, mystical, bound in night mist and fireflies, the swaying, windswept treetops stretching as far as the eye can see, silhouetted against the riot of constellations spangling the sky.

  Meredith shoulders the enormous canvas satchel as she moves across this shadowy landscape.

  For a long while it’s almost as though the hordes of walkers have spared this side of town, the gunfire and screams and choruses of moans fading into the back of her consciousness as she heads north. Meredith remembers first driving into Woodbury from this direction, she remembers passing the lake, and she remembers the fireflies—like God had sprinkled fairy dust down from the heavens, like the Spanish moss had been dripping magical sparks. She smells the horde—the scent of evil, of weakness and sin—and she hears the shuffling footsteps behind her.

  Some of the dead have spotted her with bird dog intensity. The rabbit has been roused from its hole, and now the chase is on, the walkers are coming for her, a huge contingent of the herd splitting off and pursuing her. She starts to sing as she picks up her pace. “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird…”

  The sound of her voice—so alien to her own ears in the bullet-riddled air—begins to draw more and more of the walkers away from the town.

  In her peripheral vision, Meredith can see their shadowy forms silhouetted against the far sodium arc lights, blackened, empty cocoons in the shape of people, slowly turning toward the sound of her singing, awkwardly changing course, one by one, coming for her.

  Crossing the thick weeds of a vacant lot, stepping over deadfalls and stone, Meredith lifts her voice and sings louder, “And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring!”

  The walkers come en masse now, scores of them trudging stupidly after Meredith, only their eyes visible like reflectors buried in their charred faces. The plan is working. Meredith feels the mob closing in on her like acid bathing the back of her neck. She turns east and heads down a narrow footpath. She can’t see the lake through the trees yet, but she knows it’s close, she can smell its swamp gas and mossy odors mingling with the horrible stench of the horde rising in the darkness around her. She can hear their collective moaning and ululating, the noise spurring her on. She peers through the thick undergrowth ahead of her and sees the first glimmers of a stagnant body of water shimmering in the moonlight. She practically screams the song now. “AND IF THAT DIAMOND RING TURNS BRASS, PAPA’S GONNA BUY YOU A LOOKING GLASS!”

  She reaches the edge of the clearing and descends the bank of the tiny crescent-shaped lake.

  Not much to speak of as lakes go—more of a glorified pond, if she were to be honest about it—it reminds Meredith of the secluded fishing holes her brother Rory used to find in the backwoods of East Kentucky. She glances north and south, and sees the cypress trees dangling down into the scummy water, the little inlets glistening in the darkness, the ancient boat docks here and there with long-forgotten dinghies like stray pets, still moored, awaiting sportsmen and families who will never come.

  The walkers close in behind her, snapping branches and vibrating the undergrowth like great tectonic spasms shaking the woods, making treetops tremble. Meredith realizes she has little time left. She descends the bank, opening the satchel, and singing softly now, more to herself, as she sinks into the muck. “And if that looking glass gets broke, Papa’s gonna buy you a billy goat…”

  Timing is everything.

  The first line of the walkers bursts through the tree line like disfigured babies being born, charred faces working, masticating, the feeding frenzy in full swing. Some of them are already reaching their scorched, burned arms toward the woman in the water.

  Meredith stands knee-deep in the mire as she hurriedly opens the satchel to reveal the twenty-five pounds of ordnance that she snatched from Matthew’s arsenal—the cords of dynamite tucked into bundles, wrapped in fuses, the white phosphorous chunks like massive bars of soap, smelling of turpentine, taped to the incendiary devices—and she works quickly in the dark and the stench. The methane from the pond is so thick it practically overpowers the reek of the dead as more and more emerge from the woods and clumsily descend the muddy bank.

&n
bsp; Searching the bottom of the satchel for the Bic lighter, Meredith remembers a buried memory of her brother telling her about the flammable nature of methane. “Some of them ponds up to Green River, you could light the top of the water like a Sterno pot,” Rory had marveled. “Some of them swamps could burn till the twelfth of never.” Her heart races suddenly. She can’t find the lighter.

  The first walker splashes toward her, a black shell of a monster. The smell is beyond terrible, a living thing wheedling up into her sinuses. She frantically searches the pit of the satchel and finally she gets her hand around the small plastic node. She pulls the lighter out and sparks the fuse.

  “And if that billy goat don’t pull,” she murmurs softly, pushing the satchel out into the middle of the pond, “Papa’s gonna buy you a cart and bull.”

  The first one pounces on her, a blur of putrid burned flesh and exposed teeth. Meredith goes limp in the water, sinking into the silt as slimy incisors penetrate her neck. She continues to sing softly to herself, comforting herself, a coo of a mother to a child, a soft cold rag on the forehead of a sick little girl. “And if that cart and bull turn over, Papa’s gonna buy you a dog named Rover…”

  More walkers reach her, and the feeding frenzy intensifies. She sinks deeper into the silt. The noise is tremendous—a turbine engine of watery gobbling sounds—rising around her as blackened canine teeth bury themselves into her neck. She can smell her own coppery blood, feel the wet sensation of her life draining down in cold rivulets into the dark, murky water. Slimy bicuspids clamp down on the fleshy parts of her thighs, her shoulders, her nape, even the left part of her face, tearing into the gelatinous grist of her left eyeball, snapping off her vision as a television would go to a test pattern, and the pain erupts in her, but she doesn’t struggle.