The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  The explosives have floated twenty feet away, the canvas satchel glowing with the flickering fuses as it begins to sink, a Chinese lantern casting a warm glow over the gently rippling water now gilded with a shimmering membrane of scum like liquid gold in the dying light.

  She softly sings to herself in the final moments before the meat of her neck is torn completely away, along with her vocal cords, “And if that dog named Rover won’t bark, Papa’s gonna buy you a horse and cart.”

  In her last blip of consciousness—her body completely torn and quartered now in the swamp, all the feeling gone, the catastrophic pain replaced by cold darkness—she thinks of her children. She thinks of the good things, the quiet hours, and the love, as the burned corpses swarm her, at least fifty, maybe more, consuming her in a feral orgy of drooling and gobbling and smacking and chewing. More come shambling down the bank. Hundreds. Maybe a thousand all told if you count the regiments of dead pressing in now from those thick woods bordering the lake.

  Meredith sings one last line, unsure if she is singing it aloud or in her mind or not at all: “And if that horse and cart fall down, you’ll still be the sweetest little baby in town.”

  The white heat of the blast abruptly cuts off Meredith’s final thought.

  * * *

  The night sky turns to day as three successive explosions rock the woods northwest of the Woodbury city limits. The final eruption—the biggest of them all—shoots a mushroom cloud of blinding magnesium-hot phosphorous up into the heavens, spreading outward in tendrils of cleansing white fire, sending flaming particles in every direction. A massive sonic boom breaks windows, sets off car alarms, and chimes in the rafters of the speedway a mile to the east—the aftershock mowing down trees across a blast area of ten square acres, immolating at least three hundred reanimated corpses in its wake.

  The conflagration is so sudden and massive, the reverberations are felt as far east as Highway 19, as far west as LaGrange, and as far north as Peachtree City and even some of the outer suburbs of Atlanta. But it’s the dark thickets of pine and old-growth oak to the south of Woodbury in which the aftershock reaches an unexpected listener.

  A couple of nanoseconds after the initial fireball lights up the sky, the resounding boom that ensues makes a figure crouching in the deepest part of those woods jerk with a start. A young man in his middle twenties, clad in work boots and a faded, patched chambray shirt, he has the feral gaze, filthy face, and matted hair of a lone survivor.

  He twitches at the noise and light, and he instinctively ducks behind the deadfall logs next to which his nominal campfire still smolders. He has been in the wilderness for nearly three weeks now, searching for help, never giving up hope or abandoning the cause that propelled him here. Now, for the first time, he believes there may be others out there who can perhaps help him—as well as the family he left behind—and the thought of it makes his heart beat faster. Explosions of this magnitude rarely happen on their own. Whoever detonated this thing could be the savior he is looking for. On the other hand, that light in the sky could also spell doom.

  The progenitors of this explosion could be emissaries of the devil, just waiting for someone like him to wander into their web of violence and sin.

  He shivers and wraps the tattered blanket from his pack around his slender form. He gazes up at the orange bruise of light on the northern horizon and wonders if he should follow that light …

  … or avoid it like the plague.

  * * *

  “NO! JESUS, NO!” Calvin Dupree, on his belly now, just outside the blast area, on the ground at the edge of the vacant lot along Dromedary Street, screams into the dirt. Plumes of his dusty breath are visible in the fading radiance of the blast.

  Only minutes ago, when he had realized with horror what was happening—the missing ordnance, the AWOL wife, the sudden and unexpected shift in the herd’s course, and the echoes of Meredith’s lullaby drifting ghostlike over the trees—he had frantically squeezed his way through a gap in the wall, charged across town, and had almost made it to the woods. But Lilly had chased him down, and at the last moment, before the sky lit up, she had made a leaping dive and tackled him to the ground. Calvin had struggled mightily in her grasp when the explosion finally shook the earth and rained debris down on them.

  Now Lilly struggles to sit up next to him, her ears ringing so severely she can hardly hear his sobbing.

  “SWEET JESUS!” he cries into the earth. “MEREDITH, OH, GOD! NONONONONONONONO!”

  The light of the blast has faded already to a dull orange glow behind the trees, the air stinking of cordite, burned circuits, and brimstone. A few surviving walkers scatter across the vacant lot in front of them, on the edge of the woods, stunned by the blast, moving now as though punch-drunk. Calvin rises to his feet and lunges toward the glowing fires through the trees.

  “No, Calvin—wait! WAIT!” She leaps to her feet and grabs him. “There’s nothing you can do! You’ll get yourself killed!”

  A stray walker approaches, with blackened flesh crackling and mouth creaking open and shut—a former adult male, burned beyond recognition now—reaching its scalded arms for Calvin, who stumbles when he tries to sidestep the creature. Calvin falls to the ground, sobbing with grief and horror, yelling something about not caring whether he lives or dies, as Lilly draws her Ruger from the back of her belt, swings it up, and squeezes off two pinpoint shots into the cranium of the troublesome walker.

  The thing lashes back with the impact of the blasts, the top of its head flinging off into the night, trailing a comet tail of brain matter.

  The creature collapses five feet from where Calvin hunches in a heap on the ground, weeping, slobbering inarticulately about Meredith being sick and this didn’t have to happen and why, God, why? Lilly sees more walkers coming and kneels next to Calvin and reaches out for him, but then something happens that takes Lilly aback—even in the midst of all this carnage and horror—to the point where she stiffens suddenly.

  Calvin wraps his arms around her. He hugs her tightly, sobbing, trembling, murmuring now, only a few of his words audible in Lilly’s ringing ears: “This was bound to happen, I should have seen it coming, I should have known, I could’ve—I could’ve—oh, Lord, I could’ve stopped it!”

  “Sssshhhhhhhhh,” Lilly utters softly in his ear, her body stiff and awkward in his embrace. She pats his back. Out of the corner of her eye she can see more walkers skulking along the tree line, silhouetted by the dying glow of the fires. They have to get out of there soon, or they could easily be overwhelmed. But her attention is wrenched from the here and now to some other time. She thinks of Josh, and she thinks of Austin, and the very thought of them—her former lovers, saviors, partners in crime, lost forever—sends a zing of sympathy, even empathy, bolting down Lilly’s spine. Her eyes well up as she pats the trembling back of this poor man. “It’s not your fault,” she whispers to him, “just remember that.”

  “Look what she did … she saved us,” he manages, his sobs stealing his air, his breath hot in Lilly’s ear. “Look how she … how she went out.”

  “I know.” Lilly takes the man by the shoulders. “Look at me now, Calvin. Can you look at me?”

  “She didn’t deserve to go out this way, Lilly,” he says, almost moaning the words as though gut-shot. “She never meant anyone any—”

  “Hey!” Lilly shakes him. “Look at me, Calvin. Look at me.”

  “What?” He gazes at her through liquid eyes. “What do you want from me?”

  “Listen to me. We have to get back. There’s too many of them out here.”

  He nods. “I understand.” He wipes his mouth and his eyes. Another nod. “I’m ready.” He rises to his feet, feels for his gun. “My gun … what happened to it?”

  Lilly gazes off at a cluster of smoldering, blackened corpses dragging toward them.

  She grabs a handful of Calvin’s shirtsleeve and yanks him gently backward. “Leave it, Calvin,” she says. “Leave it … c’mon … n
ow.”

  He doesn’t have to be told a third time.

  * * *

  For the rest of that night, and well into the next morning, Lilly and the people of Woodbury go about the business of cleaning up the mess. Fortunately, the explosions that razed the adjacent woods took the steam out of the herd, reducing the throng to a manageable fifty or so shell-shocked walkers still shuffling about the periphery of town. It’s a simple matter of picking off the remaining corpses with sniper rifles from positions above the wall. The process takes longer than one might expect, however, due to the lack of training among most of the shooters, as well as the questionable aim of David Stern in particular.

  By noon the next day, they have destroyed practically every remaining walker in the general vicinity—the burned cadavers, dubbed Krispy Kremes by Speed, much to the annoyance of Lilly, who’s trying to keep things quiet and respectful considering the tragic events of the night before—until there are only a handful of unburned dead dragging back and forth across the wall. Lilly assigns a team to remove the corpses from the immediate area with a pickup truck equipped with a front shovel. They use the contraption to dig a trench on the other side of the railroad tracks for the mass burial, which takes a good part of that afternoon.

  Throughout the cleanup operations, they manage to keep the details of the previous night from the Dupree children—for the time being, at least—instead telling them that their mother is off on a run with some of the other residents. Calvin has asked Lilly to give him time to figure out how to break the news to the kids.

  Late that afternoon, Calvin, Lilly, and Bob have a brief and private memorial for the heroic, troubled woman. They have the impromptu service on the edge of the woods, with Bob keeping watch behind them for any walkers that might be drifting by. Calvin speaks of his wife’s generosity, her love for her kids, and her deep, unshakable faith.

  Standing in the shade of a giant black oak, head bowed, gnats humming around her ears as she listens to Calvin’s liturgy, Lilly is impressed by the man’s command of Scripture—he recites the entire Litany for the Souls of the Faithful Departed without missing a beat. Although Lilly has never been a big fan of religious types, she’s now coming around to a different conclusion. Perhaps because of the apocalyptic nature of the world around her, or maybe in spite of it, she feels a deep and abiding and somewhat unexpected respect for this man. He’s gentle and kind and steadfast—traits that are becoming increasingly rare these days.

  When he finishes his eulogy, Calvin walks across the leprous ground to the edge of the scorched crater formed by the blasts—a vast and ravaged swampland of ruined trees and shreds of inhuman remains still faintly smoking in the breeze—and bows his head and cries softly for several minutes. Lilly and Bob give the man his space, standing back outside the tree line for a spell.

  At last, Calvin digs in his pocket and pulls out a small piece of jewelry.

  From her vantage point fifty feet away, Lilly can see that it’s a gold ring, perhaps a wedding ring—it’s hard to tell at this distance—which Calvin tosses ceremonially into the crater. The sense of finality, of closure, is apparent now on the wiry man’s face as he turns and walks slowly back to where Bob and Lilly are standing. Lilly can see a sense of relief on the man’s gaunt features as well. Maybe Meredith Dupree had come to weigh heavily on her husband, like a yoke, pressing down more each day. Maybe the burden of her mental illness had taken its toll, and no matter how sad her exit from this world had turned out to be, it was probably, when all things were considered, for the best.

  “You okay?” Lilly studies the thin man after he returns from the crater.

  He gives her a nod, wiping his eyes. “I’ll be fine,” he says.

  “She was a hero in every sense of the word.”

  Another nod, his gaze intense. “I think I’m ready, Lilly.”

  “Ready for what?”

  He looks at her. “Ready to tell my kids the truth.”

  * * *

  The sun sets that day on a clear sky, leaving behind very little trace of itself other than a deep indigo-red glow on the horizon. The golden hour that follows settles down on the backwaters and forests of Central Georgia like eiderdown, turning the light all gauzy and amber. The stillness that sets in causes sounds to travel farther than usual, echoing and reverberating over the hollows and valleys and chains of lakes. At this time of night, the ghostly moaning of walkers can be heard from great distances.

  In a nest of weeds under a thicket of tall pines approximately eleven miles southeast of Woodbury, the lone survivor tries to block out the echoing sounds of walkers on the wind by covering his ears. He winces, his boyish face so covered with grime he looks like a chimney sweep in some Dickens tale. A high-strung young man with a collection of nervous tics and obsessive-compulsive habits, Reese Lee Hawthorne has his meager provisions now arrayed upon the surface of a mossy stone in front of him, a pathetic inventory of a starving man: a Swiss Army knife, a candy bar that’s already been sectioned into pieces, half of it gone, a .38 Police Special pistol with a single speed loader and six rounds, a Roy Rogers autographed canteen, and a small Gideon Bible. Not much in the way of survival tools. If he doesn’t catch a rabbit or a fish soon, it looks like another night of Milky Way crumbs and sips of tepid well water.

  Who is he kidding? He’s not some Delta Force grunt survivalist—he’s just an uneducated mall rat from the suburbs of Jacksonville. What gave him the idea he could single-handedly save his family? Why did they send him—Reese, the youngest adult male—to find help, to find somebody willing and able to rescue the entire group? What were they thinking? What was he thinking?

  He jerks at a gust of wind carrying another horrible warbling chorus of moaning—probably the vocalizations of the same swarm that surrounded his family. The collective noise of the undead—especially scores and scores of them—takes on an eerie, atonal, chiming sound out here in the wide-open spaces of rural Georgia, like countless broken church bells heralding some hellish black mass.

  Reese covers his ears tighter, trying to block it out. He needs to get moving again. He feels paralyzed in this warren of cattails and wild juniper. If only he could think of a way to navigate toward that flash of light in the sky he saw last night.

  That controlled explosion means people are out there, and the existence of people means the potential for help, maybe even the saving grace for his family. If only he could figure out a means to navigate. He looks up at the sky. Already a faint sliver of a moon is visible overhead in the luminous indigo heavens. The stars will be coming out soon.

  Reese blinks, a revelation striking him, coursing through his marrow. Of course … the stars. He remembers it was clear last night—looks to be the same tonight—and then he stares at his candy bar wrapper. He stares and stares, the realization turning in his gut like a cold fist: Milky Way.

  The North Star is part of the Big Dipper constellation in the Milky Way galaxy—he remembers that much from grade school—and that means he can keep moving at a ninety-degree angle to its vector, which is west … or something like that.

  He starts packing up his scant supplies, oblivious of the fact that there are now seven dark figures moving through the undergrowth less than a hundred yards away.

  * * *

  “Got some very sad news to tell y’all,” Calvin says to his children after closing the door to the administrative offices of the Woodbury courthouse. The three kids all sit on a threadbare sofa pushed against the boarded windows, a small bookcase beside it with about a dozen children’s books and a few board games lining its shelves, a rocker against the opposite wall. The furniture had been brought in to make the place more homey for the Duprees—Lilly had offered up the courthouse’s second floor as a temporary quarters for the family—and Meredith had been in the process of making it a little more convivial. Now the father of the family paces in front of his kids with his hands in the pockets of his filthy chinos. “There ain’t no easy way to say this so I’m just gon
na come out and say it … your mama is … well, the fact is she’s with the Good Lord in heaven now.”

  “What?!” Tommy Dupree scowls at his father as though the man just passed gas. “What are you talking about?”

  Calvin lets out a long, agonized sigh and slowly nods at his son. “Your mom got in a tight situation with the walkers last night, and she didn’t make it.” He looks at the younger kids. “Your mama went and got herself killed last night and went to heaven.”

  The brief beat of silence is excruciating as the faces of the three children register what he’s saying. The younger ones crumble immediately: Nine-year-old Bethany stares at her father as though the world has begun to melt in front of her eyes, her cherubic face stretching into a mask of agony, tears spontaneously tracking down her cheeks. The youngest—five-year-old Lucas—makes a valiant attempt to be strong like his big brother but can’t stop his lower lip from jutting out miserably, nor can he prevent his huge doe eyes from welling up with enormous tears. Only Tommy reacts with a complex series of expressions and postures. It’s unclear to Calvin how much the twelve-year-old knew about his mother’s condition, but now the boy stands with clenched fists and paces to the other side of the room and stares at the wall. His lips are pressed together so tightly they look as though they were drawn on with an eyeliner pencil. He blinks and scans the room as though someone might jump out at any moment and say, “April fools!” At last, he looks at his father with a baleful frown full of scorn and recrimination. “What happened, Dad?”

  Calvin looks at the floor as the younger kids’ crying builds up steam, gradually at first—just hitching, gaspy breaths—but then Bethany starts to wail. Calvin can’t take his eyes off his work boots, the same paint-spattered steel-toed Timberlands that served him well for the last fifteen years as a general contractor in Fayetteville, Alabama. Now the flecks of gray paint are stippled with deep reddish-brown droplets of dried blood. “She was helping out with the explosives that we was using to ward off the herd, and she got too close to the … she had a … she had an accident with the … she … she couldn’t … aw, screw it!”