Calvin looks at his kids, then glances across the room at his oldest boy. Fists clenched, jaw set, teeth gnashing, Tommy burns his little hormonal twelve-year-old scowl like a laser into Calvin’s soul. What is Calvin supposed to do? Lie to his son? About something this important? Swallowing back the agony, wiping his eyes, Calvin goes over to the rocking chair. He flops down with a grunt and a sigh, the weight of the world on him now. “Okay … the truth,” he says. He looks at each kid. One at a time. He looks at them with the love of a father as well as the hard realities that good fathers do not hold back from their kids. “The truth is, your mama was a hero.”
“Did she get bit?” Bethany speaks through her sobs, her small hands wringing the fabric of her skirt. “Did them walkers eat her up?”
“No, no, no … darlin’, no.” Calvin leans forward, reaches out for the two little ones, and pulls them gently off the couch and over to the rocker. He sits one on each of his skinny legs. “It’s the other way around. Your mama didn’t get bit at all.” He tenderly squeezes their shoulders. “Your mama got the better of them monsters. She saved this town. She saved the lives of each and every man, woman, and child in this town.”
The kids are sniffing back the tears, nodding, listening intently as Calvin tells the truth.
“She did something amazing. She took a bunch of dynamite and led the walkers away from town, and when she got them all in one place at a safe distance, she blew them bastards up.” Calvin’s voice breaks then, and he feels the grief unexpectedly bubbling up. He begins to cry. “She … she blew ’em up … and she … she saved us all. Just like that. Saved this town. Your mama. She’s a hero and always will be. Probably build a statue of her someday.” His sobs tumble into hysterical laughter. “What do you think of that? A statue of your mama right next to the one of General Robert E. Lee!”
The kids look down, sniffling and trying to process it all, as Calvin reins his emotions back in. He strokes their hair. His voice softens. “She led them monsters like the Pied Piper all the way out of town so nobody would get hurt.” Calvin looks across the room at his oldest son, his problem child, his black sheep.
Tommy looks at the floor, lips pursed tightly, trying not to cry. He scrapes the toe of his Chuck Taylor high-top sneaker across the dusty checkerboard tile. At last he feels the sorrow resonating off his father’s words, and he looks up, and the two of them—father and son—meet each other’s gaze.
“Your mama was a stone-cold, bad-ass hero,” Calvin says to the little ones.
But it’s obvious now he’s talking to Tommy.
Slowly nodding, turning to the wall, Tommy closes his eyes and finally allows himself to silently sob.
EIGHT
Contrary to the old saying, time does not heal all wounds. With some wounds, it makes no difference the amount of time that passes, or how much one drinks, or how many therapists one sees. Glaciers could cleave continents, and the pain would still live somewhere in the secret chambers of the heart. For the lucky ones, scar tissue forms, and the passage of time builds more and more tissue until the pain is simply part of a person’s makeup, part of who he or she is—the grain in the wood. Lilly knows this from experience, and she knows that Calvin and his children will experience it in their own ways in the coming weeks and months and years.
For the Dupree family, the scar tissue begins to form the very next day.
Lilly puts everybody—including the Dupree kids—to work cleaning up the town, for both practical and psychological reasons. Lilly figures it’s best to keep people moving, keep minds and bodies occupied, to not give anybody time to ruminate, a rolling stone gathers no moss, idle hands are the devil’s workshop, a moving target is hard to hit, and all those other hoary old clichés that cross Lilly’s mind that day as she keeps things buzzing along.
The wall needs more work. There are still the charred remains of walkers to clear. And the long-gestating idea of planting crops in the racetrack arena needs the next stage implemented—gathering the seeds to be tilled into the ground.
Bob asks Lilly if he can go on another run outside the barricade to the derelict drugstore. Bob has become obsessed with that mysterious tunnel in that cellar under the store, and he explains to Lilly that it could be a gold mine—figuratively, at least—leading to hidden caches of valuable resources. Woodbury is getting dangerously low on fuel, drinking water, batteries, soap, lightbulbs, propane, ammunition, candles, matches, and any edible protein other than dried beans. It’s been weeks since somebody bagged a deer, waterfowl, or even the scrawniest rabbit. Not that Bob is planning on doing any big-game hunting under the You-Save-It Pharmacy, but one never knows what one might find in such a place. He remembers reading about coal and salt mines in these parts that occasionally get bought off by large companies and turned into vast subterranean storage facilities. Lilly agrees that it’s a good idea to investigate further and suggests that Bob take along Matthew and Speed. Bob decides to head out the next morning at dawn.
He has a feeling about that place. Bob rarely has feelings like this. He doesn’t take them lightly. Of course, it could be nothing.
But then again … one never knows.
* * *
“Yo, Bob! You gotta see this!” The voice booms in the fetid, clammy darkness of the tunnel, coming from the abyss fifty feet ahead of where Bob crouches in the dust, his miner’s lamp casting a circle of light on the cracked dirt floor. The air smells of old roots and ancient bottom soil and the flinty musk of eons passing in the dark. For the last fifteen minutes, Bob has been hunkering down in the four-foot-wide passageway, doing tracings of strange fossilized impressions in the walls and across the floor with the pages of onionskin paper he found upstairs strewn behind a counter. The tracings have been serving as a note-keeping device in lieu of a digital camera. All the cameras in Woodbury are out of battery power or stolen or simply too much of a luxury on which to waste precious energy—AC or DC. Now Bob has gathered at least twenty of these sheets of tracings, neatly folded and stuffed into the inner breast pocket of his jacket, most of them bearing pencil impressions of footprints, wagon-wheel ruts, and strange chainlike shapes embedded in the walls and hard-packed earth of the tunnel. “You ain’t gonna believe this!”
“Keep your shirt on, I’m comin’!” Bob rises to his feet and carefully makes his way down a main conduit of plaster and earth walls reinforced with wooden planks and load-bearing timbers, the dim yellow beam of his miner’s lamp leading the way. He can see Matthew up ahead, his flashlight shining down at the tunnel floor, forming a silver circle the size of dinner plate. Beyond the point at which Matthew crouches, the tunnel seems to go on forever into the void of darkness. The sound of Bob’s boot steps, crunching in the grit, echoes eerily.
After nearly an hour of exploration, Bob and his two comrades have concluded several things about the tunnel: (1) There are far more tunnels than they first thought—in fact, a labyrinth of tunnels, the main pipeline intermittently crossed with tributaries—most of the secondary tunnels barely wide enough for an adult to pass on hands and knees. (2) The main conduit seems to extend for miles, the limits of which Speed Wilkins, with his high-powered flashlight duct-taped to his AR-15, is currently testing. And (3) Bob keeps discovering odd little pieces of evidence that may very well suggest a human presence many years earlier.
“Get a load of this,” Matthew intones gravely as Bob comes up behind him, crouching to take a look at what the younger man is babbling about. Matthew’s Bushmaster rifle is dangling from a shoulder strap, and a few toothbrushes still in their blister packs stick out of his jeans pocket. The toothbrushes, also from the ransacked pharmacy, are Bob’s idea, as are the dental mirrors, tracing paper, floss, magnifying glass, cotton swabs, hand wipes, and rubbing alcohol. He sees this mission as a sort of archaeological dig—a very important experiment that could easily have a direct impact on the lives of everyone in Woodbury.
“Holy fucking Christ,” Bob utters softly as he stares at the oval of light.
“How the hell did I miss that?”
The human skull is sticking sideways out of the ground, as burnished with age as old ivory. The teeth lining the jawbone look like Indian corn. A rusty iron band, so oxidized it looks barnacled, is also partly visible, wrapped around the muddy stalk of a neck where the cervical vertebrae poke through like a strand of yellowed pearls.
“It was totally buried,” Matthew says almost reverently, not taking his eyes off the skull. “I stepped on something brittle, heard a crack.” He shines the light farther down the edge of the path. “Check this out.”
Bob feels his scalp crawl as he gazes at pieces of a spine gleaming dully in the flashlight beam, a femur, and what looks like a half-buried foot with a partial ankle. But what truly captures Bob’s imagination is the shackle—the same kind of ancient iron as the collar piece, same patina of age like plaque on an old tooth—clearly bound around the ankle of whoever perished here God knows how many years ago.
“Holy Christ,” Bob mutters as he notices the crumbling links of a chain snaking off in the dirt.
“What do you make of all this, Pops?” Matthew shines the light in Bob’s face.
Bob blocks the beam with his hand. “Take that light out of my face, Junior.” The beam sweeps away. “And don’t call me ‘Pops.’”
“Oops. Sorry.” Matthew grins, playing along with the curmudgeon routine. The two men have been teasing each other good-naturedly for weeks, ever since Matthew asked Bob’s age, and Bob told him “old enough” and advised him to mind his own fucking business. “But seriously, what do you think this shit means?”
“Hell if I know,” Bob says, and then he hears a noise and looks toward the farthest reaches of the main tunnel. He sees a bruise of light flickering in the center of the darkness, like a candle flame, and hears a faint series of footsteps, as well as a huffing noise. “Hopefully Joe College here will be able to fill in some gaps.”
They both stand and face Speed’s silhouette as the young bull of a man emerges from the depths of the tunnel, coming this way with the AR-15 at rest across his chest, the flashlight beam bouncing with each stride. He looks winded, as though he just covered a great distance. “Gentlemen,” he says as he approaches.
“Find anything?” Bob asks.
“Just more tunnel.” He stops in front of them, leans his rifle on his shoulder.
“How far did you go?”
He shrugs, wiping the grime from his face. “Shit, I don’t know. A mile? Three miles?”
Matthew looks at him. “You’re shitting me! Damn thing goes that far?”
Speed shrugs again. “Farther, man. I gave up finding the end of it.”
Bob asks if he noticed anything odd, anything in the ground, anything out of the ordinary.
Speed shakes his head. “Ran across a walker about a half an hour ago. Didn’t fire at it, though, didn’t want to draw any more of ’em.”
“What’d you do?”
“Caved its head in with the butt of the rifle—no big deal.”
Bob lets out a sigh. “Was hoping we’d find something we could use down here.” He looks around. “So far it’s just these weird remains.” He gestures at the bones and tells Speed about the shackles.
Speed seems disinterested. “Whatever, man. Only thing I found back there is fucking tunnel and more tunnel. Not sure how a walker would get down here but … whatever.” He licks his lips and looks at Bob. “What now, Pops?”
Bob lets out an annoyed sigh, turns, and heads back toward the hatch, silently wishing they would stop calling him that.
* * *
“Lilly!”
Lilly hears the voice right after she turns the corner at Dromedary Street and starts toward her condo. She pauses in the late-afternoon sun and wipes the sweat from her brow. Exhausted from a full day of supervising all the crews, getting the soil plowed in the arena, and starting on the extension of the barricade, she feels damp and sore and light-headed as she sees Calvin jogging around the corner and coming toward her with a friendly wave. She is in no mood to counsel anybody right now, but she puts a smile on her face, waves back, and says, “Hey there, Calvin.”
“Glad I caught you,” he says, panting slightly as he trots up to her.
“What can I do for you?”
He swallows hard and catches his breath. “I think we’re gonna stay, Lilly.”
She stares at him for a moment while this sinks in. “That’s … fantastic.”
He nods, proffering a sad smile, eyes softening around the edges. “Wish the circumstances were different but … there ya have it.”
“I think you and the kids will be happy here.”
“I think you’re right.” He gazes out at the wall in the distance. “Places like this are few and far between.”
Lilly nods and studies the man. “I’m really sorry for your loss.”
He looks at her. “Thanks, Lilly. I appreciate that, I surely do.”
“How are the kids hanging in there?”
“They’re doing pretty dang well. Tommy’s as surly as ever. Bethany’s sleeping better, and little Luke thinks all this was prophesied.”
Lilly cocks her head. “Prophesied?”
“Long story.”
“You’re talking about all this?” She makes a sweeping gesture meaning the whole town. “Woodbury … and everything that’s happened?”
Calvin sighs. “The little duffer has visions. At least, that’s what he tells us. Dreams, visions … I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in that little noggin of his.”
“Wow.” Lilly stares at him. “Seriously?”
Calvin shrugs. “Good Lord works in mysterious ways.”
“I’ve heard that before.”
Calvin gives it some more thought. “Who am I to dismiss what the child says—anything’s possible, I guess … right?”
Lilly gives him another polite smile. “You got that right.”
“Be that as it may.” He looks at her. “I want to thank you for your patience with us, your kindness. You’ve really accepted us as equals.”
Lilly looks at the ground. She feels a strange flutter in her midsection. Maybe it’s nervous tension. She’s not sure. She feels vaguely self-conscious around this man. “It’s the Christian thing to do, right?” She looks at him and smiles. “I mean … that’s what I hear.”
Calvin chuckles—a warm, clean chuckle—perhaps the first time he has laughed at anything since he arrived here. “Very good, Lilly … not bad for a heathen.”
“You mean I’m not going to hell after all?”
His smile widens. “That ain’t for me to decide. But I’d say you were pretty safe.”
“That’s a relief.”
His grin fades as he gazes out at the wall and the dark, swaying treetops beyond it. The air has been almost completely free of walker stench since the day before yesterday, when Lilly and company finally cleared away the last of the burned corpses from the adjacent lots and woods and buried the remains in the mass graves along the railroad tracks. Today the breeze carries the smells of summer on it—green grass and clover and rich, fecund soil—but also a faint, troubling noise drifting occasionally across the sky, scraping the clouds. Like the call of an exotic bird that doesn’t belong in this ecosystem—a ghostly, primordial warning signal to all its prey—the distant choir of moaning can be heard intermittently above the wind. It’s enough to raise the hackles of every resident of Woodbury and cause gooseflesh to ripple down the backs of the less robust souls in the vicinity. Calvin seems to take it all in before turning back to Lilly and saying in a lower register, “Or maybe this is hell … maybe we all got damned without even noticing it … damned to huddle inside walls like these or wander this hell on earth for eternity.”
Lilly stares for a moment, then blinks away the sudden pall of doom. She gives him a look. “No offense, Calvin, but remind me not to invite you to any parties.”
Another weary chuckle from the man. “Sorry about that.” He pulls a bandanna from
his back pocket and wipes the moisture from his neck. “Guess I get carried away sometimes.” He gives her another warm smile, and just for an instant Lilly sees the good and simple artisan that Calvin had been in preplague days. She could just imagine him making a chalk line and carefully planing wood with those calloused hands, a cigarette dangling from his lips. “You gotta watch me constantly,” he says to her finally, “or I’ll go all Pat Robertson on ya.”
Lilly laughs. “That’s okay, I can take it.” She offers her hand to him—a spontaneous gesture that takes even her by surprise—and says, “I guess I should make it official. Welcome to Woodbury.”
He shakes her hand with a firm grip. “I thank y’all for that.”
“We’re glad to have you, Calvin.”
“Thank you.”
They release their grip, and Lilly says, “If you’re interested, I’d like to invite you to be a permanent member of the committee.”
“The what?”
“Group of people that meets regularly—you met them last week when we were discussing what to do about the herd. The purpose is basically to make decisions. We need clear-headed people.”
Calvin chews the inside of his cheek as he turns it over in his mind. “I guess I could do that.”
“Good. It’s settled, then.”
“One thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“You mentioned this gentleman, used to run things around here, called himself the Governor…”
Lilly nods. “That’s right. What about him?”
Calvin looks at her. “I just want to be clear. I know this guy was a bad apple. And you got more of a democracy around here now. But I just want to be clear about something so I understand.”
“Understand what?”
He looks as though he’s parsing his words. “Are you sort of … well … the new Governor?”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 9
