She lets out a long, anguished breath. “Not even close, Calvin. Not even close.”
* * *
Late that night. The moon high in the sky. The forest east of Woodbury as quiet as a chapel. Crickets droning down in the velvety shadows of pines along Elkins Creek. The air stitched through with errant sounds—warbling, plaintive moaning, twigs snapping, and a series of hyperventilated breaths as an emaciated figure in tattered clothing stumbles along the banks of the stream looking for a way across.
Reese Lee Hawthorne has been weaving clumsily through the trees all evening, following the creek south, looking for a footbridge or a cluster of deadfall logs over which he can cross the wide channel of murky water. He needs to head due west, but the creek—at this point more of a river, its currents running swift, cold, and deep—has prevented him from crossing. Now he’s beginning to hallucinate from lack of food. He sees tiny luminous eyes watching him from behind the trees. He sees motes of stardust floating in the shadows. His legs are about to give out. He can smell walkers nearby. He can hear the rustling footsteps, awkwardly shuffling through the leaves behind him. Or maybe he’s imagining it. He knows he shouldn’t be traveling at night. Too dangerous. But it’s the only way he can navigate and stay on course.
He pauses to catch his breath, leaning against the trunk of a massive oak, silently praying to the Lord, asking for guidance, asking for strength, when he sees a strange apparition about thirty-five yards away. He blinks and looks away, thinking it must be another hallucination. He looks back at it.
Sure enough, in the middle distance, it rises up above the treetops and spans the river: a modest little wood-frame cottage floating ten feet or so above the water with no visible means of support, a magical, fairy-tale home for some leprechaun or water sprite. Reese swallows the fear and shakes his head at the impossibility of it, but there it is.
The darkness and the shimmer of moonlight on its gabled roof give it an almost ethereal quality as Reese approaches it cautiously from the woods. If this is a mere hallucination caused by starvation, stress, sleeplessness, or low blood sugar, it is absolutely the most detailed hallucination in the history of man. Reese can see the worm-eaten siding as he draws closer, the traces of chimney-red paint long faded and burnished away in the Georgia sun.
Fever chills crawl down Reese’s nape as he approaches and sees the shadow of the house cast by the moonlight across the water beneath it. Sure enough, without reason or logic, the cottage levitates in the air above Elkins Creek like some perpetual magic act. Reese abruptly stops. He freezes and stares at the weather-beaten cottage. Wait a minute. He stares at the huge maw of an opening at one end of the edifice, a passageway big enough to accommodate a horse-drawn carriage or a small pickup truck. He sees the rough-hewn road leading into the structure.
“Stupid … stupid idiot,” he chides himself under his breath, realizing that it’s a covered bridge.
This part of Georgia is lousy with covered bridges, some of them dating back to antebellum days. Most of them are modest enclosures of barn siding and shingles, but a few are elaborate Victorian gingerbreads so festooned with trim and other embellishments they look as though they were fashioned by elves. This one is a simple affair of clapboard and shingles, with a single decorative dormer on each end. Kudzu vines cling to one outer wall, and a runnel of slimy water flows down one corner into the brackish currents beneath it.
Reese takes a deep breath, scales the slope leading up to the east entrance, and enters.
Inside it’s all darkness and foul-smelling rot, like a wine cellar in which all the bottles have broken and the wine has turned to vinegar. The air is so fusty and dank it seems to have weight to it. Reese considers running to the other side—the length of the bridge is less than thirty feet—but for some reason he walks. His boot steps on the boardwalk crunch loudly in his ears; he can feel his pulse in his jaw.
His gaze fixes itself on a pile of rags near the opposite opening.
At first glance, in the shadows, it looks like a mound of earth, but as Reese draws closer and closer, he sees that it’s a pile of old discarded blankets and unidentifiable clothing, filmed in moss and filth, so weathered and distressed the pile has congealed and adhered to the floor of the bridge. Reese doesn’t even look at it as he passes it on his way out the other end.
He is halfway through the opening when a blackened arm shoots out of the pile as though it were spring loaded. Reese yelps and stumbles to the ground, a walker’s hand clamped around his ankle. He twists in its grip, fumbling for his gun. He keeps a bullet in the chamber for these very emergencies but the viselike pressure of the fingers and the startling condition of the attacker have him paralyzed.
Barely visible, the thing from the rag pile is a surreal sight in the moonlit shadows—a creature whose gender has become unrecognizable. Desiccated by the weather into a shriveled corpse of scabby flesh and bone, its hair like seaweed matted to its skull, it opens half a mouth and chews at the leather instep of Reese’s boot with the vigor of a wood chipper. The vibration and sound of it—for one frenzied instant—registers in Reese’s frantic thoughts as a chain saw on its slowest speed digging into a particularly stubborn root.
Reese manages to get his .38 Police Special out from behind his belt and halfway aimed, with his thumb snapping down on the hammer and his finger around the trigger pad, before the thing’s mossy teeth puncture the shoe leather now standing between Reese and eternity. Reese squeezes off three shots in the general direction of the creature’s cranium—the series of flashes like lightbulbs exploding in the night—the radiance flaring brightly in the walker’s copper-penny eyes.
Half its sunken face is blown off, along with part of its scalp and an enormous chunk of its shoulder—the wound so profound that the head detaches from the body, the rotted tendons like waterlogged vines—and the body falls away to the ground.
Reese lets out a spontaneous scream that echoes up across the dark firmament when he sees the head still furiously chewing on his boot. The brain intact, the teeth still latched on to Reese with the Zen-like fervor of a praying mantis, the head goes at him more vigorously than ever. Reese kicks at it—again and again—until just before the teeth penetrate the capsule of boot leather and break the skin, the skull snaps off and rolls.
Clambering to his feet in the darkness, drunk with terror, mind swimming, Reese Lee Hawthorne scuttles after the rolling head.
The cranium has gathered speed on the downward slope and tumbles toward a ditch. Reese chases it—grunting and hyperventilating and yelling garbled, inarticulate cries—until he finally catches up to it and stomps on it as though putting out a fire. The cranial bones collapse as the thing caves in. He stomps and stomps. The skull flattens with the pulpy wetness of an overripe melon.
Reese doesn’t even realize that he’s crying until the pain of his repeated stomping shoots up his leg and cramps in his thigh and hip.
He falls to his knees, and then collapses onto his back. He sobs and sobs, lying on the hard-packed road, staring up at the night sky. He weeps without shame or inhibition, sobbing noisily and wetly for several moments—much of it saved up over the last few days of relentless foraging—until he literally runs out of breath. In a weakened state from early-stage starvation, he can hardly move now. He just stares up at the star-riddled heavens, taking shallow breaths, lungs hitching painfully.
A long moment passes. Reese thinks of God the Father up there in the glittering sky. A childhood spent in the Pentecostal church has taught Reese that God is an angry, stern taskmaster. God is judgmental and vengeful. But maybe Reese’s God will have mercy on him. Perhaps this God—the same deity who visited this hell on the earth—will pause in his acts of vengeance to give Reese Lee Hawthorne a break. Please, God, Reese thinks, please help me find the people who ignited those explosions.
No response is forthcoming … only the vast and impassive silence of the black sky.
NINE
Lilly can’t sleep. But inste
ad of lying in bed, staring at the plaster whorls in the ceiling of her apartment on Main Street, ruminating on all the things she has to do, she decides to get up and fix a cup of instant coffee and make some lists. Her father, Everett, always used to say, “You get overwhelmed by life, Little Missy, you make a list. It’s always a good first step, and even if you don’t get a single thing on it done, it’ll make you feel better.”
Which is why, for the better part of two hours that night, Lilly sits by the front bay window—boarded on the outside and blocked on the inside by rows of spindly houseplants that Lilly is trying to nurse back to life—and scrawls to-do lists on a legal tablet with a pencil she keeps sharpened with her pocket knife. Many of the items that she initially writes down she hastily erases, realizing there is no hardware store in which to purchase the required nuts and bolts for the task, or the item is impossible without replenishing the dwindling fuel supplies. After an hour or so, she ends up with a workable list of undertakings:
TO DO
1. Put together fuel search team
2. Find more fuel
3. Put together seed search team
4. Find seeds for arena gardens
5. Finish plowing arena infield
6. Plant arena gardens
7. Establish rotating barricade builder teams
8. Work on extending barricade to Dromedary St.
9. Have Bob do house-to-house health check
10. Do agenda for steering committee meeting
Tutor for kids
Health center
Food-sharing co-op
Solar heaters
Compost
Biofuel
Sustainable technologies
11. Meet with steering committee
12. Stay positive
13. Find somebody else to be the leader of Woodbury
Scanning this last item, she can’t hold back a wicked smile.
Lilly knows there’s nobody dumb enough to assume the leadership role of this little ship of fools, but she keeps on fantasizing. She keeps on thinking about it. What if she were just a citizen, an ordinary resident of an ordinary town? Wouldn’t that be amazing? She pushes her chair back and levers herself to her feet, rubbing her sore neck. She’s been sitting at the front window for nearly two hours now, going through half a dozen pencil leads, mostly scratching out the items on her wish lists, and now she feels like she just might be able to get some much-needed sleep.
She goes back into her bedroom and pauses in front of the makeshift mirror that’s canted against the wall behind her door. She looks at her reflection. The girl staring back at her is almost unrecognizable.
In her baggy sweatpants and Georgia Tech sweatshirt, Lilly looks androgynous, even boyish, her wan, sun-tinted auburn hair pulled back tight and scrunched with a rubber band, which only serves to draw attention to her severe, angular features. It’s literally been two years since she wore makeup. But it also looks as though there’s something new behind her hazel eyes, something behind her stare that Lilly hasn’t previously noticed. In normal circumstances she might chalk it up to age—at the moment, the single kerosene lamp in her bedroom throws an unforgiving light on her face, making the crow’s-feet around her eyes look even more prominent than usual—but in this environment it suggests darker changes than simple wear and tear. The original softness in her face has been sandblasted away by the savagery of these times, and Lilly isn’t sure how she feels about this.
She lifts the loose fabric of the tattered sweatshirt and looks at her scrawny tummy. A slender girl for most of her life, Lilly has gone from skinny to downright withered in the past few months—her ribs poking through the flesh of her sides like vestigial fins. She pinches a tiny amount of flesh around her nonexistent belly. She wonders what she would’ve looked like if she hadn’t gone through the miscarriage last month. She looks at herself and imagines her midriff growing plump, her breasts filling out, her nipples darkening, her face becoming round and full and ripe. All at once a dagger of emotion stabs her midsection, and she turns away from the mirror, tamping down on the sadness. She drives the melancholy thoughts from her mind and crosses the room.
Exhausted, she flops down on the bed with her clothes still on. She drifts off to sleep without even being aware of it because it seems almost as though the knocking noises come an instant later. Lilly sits up with a jerk as though she dreamt the noise, but the knocking continues, hard and fast, somebody impatiently banging on her door.
“Jesus, what now?” she grumbles as she drags herself out of bed. She considers grabbing her pistol but decides not to and instead shuffles out into the living room in her bare feet, yawning and scratching her sore tummy.
“Lilly-girl, I’m sorry to bug you at this hour,” Bob Stookey says when Lilly finally pulls the front door open. Dressed in a wife-beater and paint-spattered work pants, the older man is breathless. His grizzled face blazes with excitement. “I think when you see what I got to show you, you’ll understand.”
Lilly yawns again. “Can you give me a hint?”
“Okay … hint. It’ll change the way we live our life here in Woodbury.”
She looks at him. “Is that all?”
“Okay, hardy-har-har. C’mon, get your shoes and grab a flashlight.”
* * *
They cross the silent town square, the darkness and chill of the predawn hours at their deepest, the sky moonless, the air as stagnant as that of a tomb. Only their footsteps can be heard echoing in the stillness.
“Not too many people been in here lately,” Bob comments as he climbs the stone steps of a small two-story brick edifice. “Guess folks are more interested in survival than enriching themselves.” They pause at the entrance. Bob points at the shattered windowpane in the door. “Somebody broke in and ransacked the place not too long ago but probably didn’t find much use for old encyclopedias and broken-down mimeograph machines.”
The door squeaks open, engulfing Lilly in a memory scent as strong as antique potpourris: steam heat and bookbinding glue; musty pages and old floor wax. She follows the beam of Bob’s flashlight across the littered lobby, pausing to take in the shadowy forms of bookshelves, file drawers, library carrels, and empty coatracks where grade-school children once hung their rain slickers on field trips to research the national flower of Nicaragua.
“Watch your step, Lilly-girl,” Bob says, sweeping the beam of light across a heap of overturned chairs and spilled books, their ancient spines broken open like the remains of dead birds on the floor. “It’s just down this aisle.”
It takes some maneuvering—they have to weave through a junk heap of fallen shelves, scattered books, and broken glass—but Lilly finally sees Bob approaching a reference table arrayed with large documents illuminated by a pool of yellow kerosene lantern light.
“What the hell is all this?” she wants to know, looking over Bob’s shoulder as he stands over the table, opening a huge leather-bound register of some kind. The book is the size of a car door.
“Meriwether County survey maps, historic registries, property line plats, and such.” Bob turns the massive pages of the register to the place he’s bookmarked, sending puffs of dust through the cone of kerosene light. “First thing you need to know: The You-Save-It pharmacy? Little place over on Folk Avenue? Where you found that pregnancy test kit way back when? You have any idea what that property once was?”
“Bob, it’s late, I’m freezing … just tell me, cut to the chase already.”
“Do the words Underground Railroad ring any bells?” He points to an arrangement of onionskin pages on which his tracings are scrawled. Lilly notices chains, bones, human skulls, and what looks like a femur with a thick band around it. Bob nods at the sketches. “I made these tracings down there the other day, and I’ll put money on the fact that these are fossilized remains of runaway slaves. Here, look at this.” He turns to the register and runs his finger down a column of historic places. His grimy fingernail stops on the last entry:
; 1412 Folk Avenue, Woodbury, Georgia 30293
Former Site of the South Trunk Museum
Underground Railroad Safe House
Lilly studies the entry. “Okay, so that’s good to know, but how the hell does this affect—?”
“Hold your horses.” He closes the register and pulls a faded parchmentlike plat survey into the light and carefully unfolds it until it practically covers the entire table. “Lemme show you something else.” He runs his finger along a series of lines—some of them solid, some dotted—crisscrossing property lines from here to the border of Alabama. “You see them squiggly lines?”
With an exasperated roll of her eyes Lilly says, “Yes, Bob, I see the squiggly lines.”
“You know what them dotted ones are?”
She starts to give him another snarky, impatient answer but stops herself. She feels a tingling sensation along the back of her scalp as she realizes what she’s looking at. “Holy fuck,” she mutters, staring at the survey. “Those are the tunnels.”
“Bingo,” he says with a nod. “In them days, some of the routes were aboveground, of course, but some of them were actually underground.”
“Truth in advertising,” Lilly murmurs, gaping at all the dotted lines fanning out across the state like a Medusa tangle of braids. She stares at one of the longer serpentine lines. “Looks like some of them go on for miles and miles.”
“Yup.”
She looks at him. “I know that look,” she says, grinning at him.
“What look?”
“Like you swallowed a canary.”
Bob smiles, closing the massive register with a thump, sending a faint dust cloud through the dim light of the lantern. He shrugs. “Okay, look at this.” He turns the parchment at an angle and points at a tiny X with a circle around it. “You see that? I’m thinking that’s a point of egress.”
“An escape hatch?”
“Exactly.” Bob stares at the survey. “I know it’s a little early to uncork the champagne bottle, but by God it looks as though we could use some of these tunnels.”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 10
