They follow Bob across the square, down Jones Mill Road, and through the gap at the southwest corner of the barricade. Lilly feels the flesh on her neck crawling as they light out across the wasted vacant lots. The predawn stillness is broken only by the jangle of their footsteps, the rattling contents of their packs, and the thumping of Lilly’s heart, so loud in her own ears that she begins to wonder whether the others might be able to hear it as well. She’s not sure how long she can keep her little secret from them. It gnaws at her now as they cross the littered streets south of the wall, take a turn at Folk, and head single file down the scarred walkway that lines the boarded-up storefronts.
Lilly learned of her affliction—the reason for the poisonous burning fear now stewing in her gut as they close in on the drugstore—when she was just a kid, eight or nine years old, during a game of hide-and-seek with her cousins, Derek and Deek Drinkwater.
The Drinkwaters were old money from Macon. The father, Everett’s stepbrother, Tom, was involved in overseas oil trading, and was rolling in it. The Drinkwaters’ enormous antebellum Tudor mansion in Warner Robins was a chockablock monstrosity brimming with nooks and crannies and innumerable little side rooms, dumbwaiters, pantries, and water closets in which a disgruntled child could hide for days with a sack lunch and some board games.
One Sunday afternoon, while Everett was visiting Tom and his sister-in-law, Janice, the kids launched into a marathon game of hide-and-seek. With the adults sequestered in the breakfast nook, working their way through a pitcher of gin rickeys, Lilly and the twins had their run of the house. Lilly was good at the game and usually went undetected long past Ollie ollie oxen free.
On this particular day, she found an old storage closet beneath the third-floor staircase and crawled in, closing the rickety old door with a resounding click, the finality of which put gooseflesh on her arms and legs. She curled her knees against her chest and burrowed into the corner behind the mothball-redolent fur coats and musty boxes marked JANICE HATS AND MUFFLERS and TWINS BABY THINGS, and she began to sweat. That was the first indication of her condition—undiagnosed and undetected until this moment—an odd and sudden hot flash that spread over her spindly body like a brushfire. In seconds she was drenched. She tried the door and found the thing stuck. Maybe it had jammed or automatically locked from the outside or something. All Lilly knew at that moment was that she had to get out.
The sensation, as most sufferers of this condition will attest, is not unlike suffocation. Lilly couldn’t breathe in that little closet as she backed into the corner, her scalp prickling, her flesh crawling, the coats hanging down in her face seeming to close in on her, threatening to strangle her. Her heart was racing faster than it ever had before. She felt the walls pressing in, the darkness deepening.
It was a few minutes later when the screaming started. Lilly shrieked and keened and sobbed in the darkness of that tiny prison until one of the twins found her, prying the door open and letting her lurch out into the air and light of the hallway.
The incident in the Drinkwater house was soon all but forgotten by everyone present but Lilly, who realized—either through the trauma of the experience or some innate brain chemistry—that she had indeed acquired the disorder and would have it the rest of her life. It certainly was not paraplegia or cancer or anything fatal or debilitating, but it was definitely there within her, as palpable as color blindness or flat-footedness. And it would rear its demonic head within her at the most inopportune times.
She feels it now as the team approaches the drugstore. She feels her heart thrumming in her slender chest as they pause outside the entrance. Bob steps up to the shattered glass door and peers into the ransacked pharmacy for any sign of disturbance, any evidence of walkers. The cluttered aisles, broken displays, and overturned shelves lie in absolute stillness and darkness, the burgeoning purple light of dawn behind them not yet penetrating the convolutions of the You-Save-It Pharmacy.
“Lights on, everybody,” Bob murmurs as he snaps his miner’s light on and pushes the door open with the barrel of his shotgun. Bob carries the cut-down pistol-grip 12-gauge whenever he’s expecting close quarters as well as unknown walker quotients.
Lilly’s chest seizes up with terror as she follows Bob into the pharmacy, the others crunching through the broken glass behind her. The pharmacy seems to bristle and react to her presence—even though it’s all in her mind, and she knows it—the walls closing in as slowly and surely as glaciers shifting. Her mouth goes dry as they cross the empty store and each take their turn scaling down the service steps of the elevator shaft. Her joints stiffen and her spine goes icy-cold as she reaches the bottom of the steps.
The basement level is bigger than she expected and infested with moving shadows, as the slender beams of light from the helmets and flashlights sweep across the gloom. Bob locates the gaping hole in the wall—as big as a submarine hatch and exuding wafts of musky air from the darkness on the other side—and he waves everybody over. “This way, folks,” he says, lighting the way with his torch, “ladies’ lingerie and sportswear.”
Lilly’s throat closes up as she follows David into the tunnel, ducking to avoid hitting her head on the crown of the doorway.
For a moment, she pauses just inside the door, her body immobilized with fear as the others pass her, one by one.
The terror seizes her limbs, freezes her tendons, and closes her throat until she can hardly breathe as the last of the five other team members trudge past her and continue down the tunnel, their silhouettes melting into the darkness, their narrow beams of light dancing off the earthen walls and evenly spaced load-bearing timbers.
She can’t move, can’t breathe. The tunnel has morphed into the closet under the stairs, the stalactites of roots and calcium deposits now becoming the hanging fur coats and plastic-covered rain slickers that engulfed her as a child. The walls of the passageway begin to press in. She wobbles for a moment, the dizziness threatening to knock her down. One of the silhouettes in front of her pauses, turns, and glances worriedly back at her.
Bob’s deeply lined face is barely visible in the spill light from his miner’s hat, the glow revealing his vexed expression. He trudges back toward her, his pack jangling.
She looks up at him. “Sorry, Bob, I’m—” She wheezes and gasps for her breath, as though suffering an asthma attack. “I’m not—” She can’t form the words.
“What’s the matter, Lilly-girl?” He puts an arm around her and squeezes. “What’s going on?”
She inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales, until she’s calm enough to speak. “Bob, I got some bad news.”
“Tell me, honey, what’s wrong?”
She looks at him, licks her lips, lets out a pained sigh, and finally works up the nerve to explain. “I got a nasty case of claustrophobia.”
For a moment, Bob just stares at her, and then, as though a circuit breaker has blown, starts laughing, and his laughter echoes down the ceaseless passageway—a ghostly sound that makes the others abruptly halt, turn, and gawk.
* * *
It takes only a minute or so for Bob to finish having his little laugh and then dig in his medical kit for a couple tabs of Xanax. He gives them to Lilly, apologizing for his laughter, assuring her that he didn’t mean to belittle or diminish her condition and he knows how horrifying claustrophobia can be. In Kuwait, he saw a soldier choose the battlefront over a behind-the-lines job just so he could avoid the tight quarters of his Quonset hut office. But Bob goes on to explain that sometimes the shit piles up so high in this god-awful world that you just have to laugh. Besides, claustrophobia is the least of their problems right now. If the walkers don’t get them down here, the likelihood of methane poisoning, cave-ins, or a chemical leak asphyxiating them is far greater than dying from some panic attack.
The Xanax does the trick in about fifteen minutes, after which time Lilly feels good enough to walk in the lead (after apologizing to everybody for her freak-out). She’s embarrassed by her momentary paralysis, but,
in a way, it had a strange girding effect on her. It braced her for the journey ahead.
They make incredibly good time that day, tracking their progress with Matthew’s pedometer. The first hour, they put two miles behind them without encountering a single walker or cave-in.
In this early stage, the tunnel seems fairly uniform, with a cross-brace timber embedded in the ceiling every hundred feet or so and the hard-packed earthen walls reinforced with ancient chicken wire. The air smells oily, fecund, and musky, heavy with the odors of black earth and mold. Every few moments, Lilly’s miner’s light flickers across the bleached bones of human remains partially buried in the sediment. It makes her uneasy but also strangely ennobled by the purpose of their mission. Or perhaps it’s just the momentary euphoria of the drugs. Who knows?
Bob tracks their progress and current position aboveground with the survey map.
At the end of the second hour, their progress has slowed a bit due to the passageway narrowing around mile five. They pass a bizarre accumulation of calcium and limestone deposits hanging from the ceiling, which resemble massive ornate chandeliers of slimy iridescent icicles. The walls are fringed in moss at this juncture, and the air is exceedingly clammy and fetid, as though they’re moving through a rain forest.
Then the tunnel bends slightly to the right, which Bob assures everybody is south, and they run into a few partial cave-ins. Lilly starts to notice a change in the infrastructure of the tunnel—the shape becoming more squared off, with a greater number of braces and support beams—as well as intermittent gaps in the walls, which look like tributaries or secondary tunnels now boarded over and leaching gelid breaths of musty air.
When Lilly points out one of these tributaries to Bob, the older man keeps walking, mumbling casually, “Zinc mines … mostly zinc. Some of them lead, coal, maybe.” He points to the cross bracing and adds, “My guess is, the Underground Railroad linked up with defunct mines now and again, hopping from mine to mine like stepping-stone all the way to the Mason-Dixon Line.”
Lilly just shakes her head in awe, nervously fingering the beavertail grip of her Ruger, as they trudge onward for another two or three thousand feet, sidestepping enormous drifts of earth that have sifted down across the path over the decades, as well as the remnants of campfires, until they see a massive obstruction in the distant shadows.
At first it looks as though they’ve reached the end of the line—as though an aged brick wall has been erected to mark the tunnel’s terminus—but the closer they get to the obstruction, the more the true nature of the object is revealed in the flicker of their flashlight beams. “What the fucking Sam Hill is this?” Ben mumbles as the group reaches the massive piling.
It looks as though an immense mortar cylinder, covered with a patina of age like tiny barnacles on its wormy gray surface, has been driven into the earth directly through the middle of the passageway. With a diameter of five or six feet, it nearly blocks the path—with only a narrow gap on either side—but it remains unclear whether the thing’s involvement with the tunnel is by design or accident.
Lilly sticks a hand through the gap on one side. “Looks like we might be able to squeeze one at a time through either side.” She shakes off her pack. “Might have to empty some of the bigger loads.”
“That’s just fucking great,” Matthew grumbles. “More packing and unpacking.”
Reese Lee Hawthorne stands in the shadows behind Speed, chewing his fingernails. “Sorry to tell ya, but I’m pretty sure Carlinville’s still a long ways off.
“Hold your horses a second.” Bob has already crouched down by the thing and pulls out his topographical map. He shines a penlight on the page and mutters, “I think I know what this is.” He looks up at David, who is gazing over Bob’s shoulder with a furrowed brow. “David, gimme some more light down here.”
Lilly comes over to Bob. “You want to tell us what the hell this thing is?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what this is.” He glances back at the map, studies it, runs his thumbnail down a tributary. He glances up. “This here’s a load-bearing piling—a big one—the kind they sink into the ground for skyscrapers.”
Everybody processes this for a moment, all eyes and ears focused on Bob’s calculations …
… which is why nobody notices the faint sound of shuffling footsteps coming down the dark tunnel behind them.
TWELVE
In the sticky, opaque darkness underground, noises are tricky—especially one as faint and fleeting as this—but at the moment, if anyone actually bothered to listen closely to it, they would hear the riffling sound of footsteps coming from the darkness that the rescue party had just traversed, as if some clumsy, intoxicated, forgotten member of their group were hurrying to catch up. Further masking the noise is David’s incredulous, high-pitched voice: “Bob, I’m no cartographer, but unless we made a major wrong turn somewhere I’m pretty sure we aren’t standing under the streets of Atlanta right now. Am I missing something?”
“Didn’t say we were anywhere near there … and I didn’t say this is part of a building.” He rises to his feet on creaking knees, letting out a little sigh of pain. He points back down the tunnel, indicating the darkness from which they came. “That limestone and moss hanging down from the ceiling a mile or so back there—remember that?”
Everybody is nodding, and David says, “There’s a connection?”
Bob folds his map, puts it back in his shirt pocket. “Calcium deposits and mossy walls are from seepage. We were under Elkins Creek back there.”
Lilly calculates the distance, and remembers the countryside to the east of Woodbury, and realizes what Bob is getting at. “This is part of an overpass,” she enthuses breathlessly, turning back toward the massive piling, which now looks almost luminous in the darkness, as cryptic and haunting as wreckage from the Titanic. “We’re standing underneath a highway.”
“Best I can tell, somewhere near mile eleven, something like that.” Bob pats his breast pocket. “Which gives us a landmark to really pinpoint where we are.”
“Highway Seventy-four?” Reese speaks up. “Is that the one y’all are talking about?”
“That’s the one,” Bob says. “My guess is, we turned south a ways ago, probably right after we crossed under Elkins Creek, and now we’re following the highway.”
“We’re closer than I thought,” Reese observes, running fingers through his hair. “This is good, this is fantastic. Carlinville’s right next to the highway. We’re almost there! God is good.”
Another voice behind him: “Yeah, well … I hope God can help us with something else right now.”
“Huh?” Reese whirls toward the sound of grave, low words that just came out of Ben Buchholz. “Excuse me?”
“Wait for it,” Ben says with a voice full of dread. “Anybody else hear that?”
Lilly’s heartbeat kicks up a few notches. Less than a hundred yards away, the bend in the tunnel is visible behind a low-lying phosphorescent mist—most likely caused by methane—glowing now like purple gauze through moonlight. The sound of awkward shuffling footsteps rises, as a faint shadow appears on the outer wall of the bend, and all at once the ringing of hammers clicking on pistols and cocking mechanisms jolting back on assault rifles surrounds Lilly as she draws her own gun and aims the front sight at the ghostly shadow, which is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until suddenly Lilly says in a hissing stage whisper, “Wait! Everybody wait! Hold your fire!”
“Fuck that,” Ben snaps back at her, pressing the rear sight of his AR-15 to his eye. In the distant shadows, the lone walker staggers into view. Ben hisses, “I’m not gonna get pinned down by these fucking goddamn biters.”
“There’s one! Ben, there’s just one!” Lilly’s voice is stretched taut with nerves, but also authoritative enough to make Ben release the trigger pad. “Wait and see if we got any more coming!”
She doesn’t have to explain how stupid it would be to unleash a thunderous barrage of gunfire in these
tight subterranean quarters. Not only would they draw every walker within hearing distance, they would very possibly set off that ethereal purple mist. Better to take the solitary stragglers down quietly.
The walker, drawn by their voices and their scent, starts shambling toward them with a pronounced limp, reaching out with that trademark stiff-armed lumber, as though angrily demanding to be hugged. Lilly and the others just stare at it and let it come to them—zero emotion, no fear, very little affect, just the impatient waiting of fishermen preparing to spear a salmon—and the closer it gets, the more Lilly ponders it with forensic interest.
Apparently a former middle-aged man of indeterminate race, its clothing reduced to tattered strips, the thing is so filthy with grit and mud it looks like some kind of bog creature, a mummy or a pharaoh pickled in primordial goo. But it’s the leg that catches Lilly’s eye and imagination. “Bob, look at its left leg.”
“Nasty break, ain’t it?” Bob studies the creature through the scope of his stainless steel .357 Magnum with the care of a jeweler inspecting the facets of a gemstone. The creature has closed the distance between them to fifty yards, and now the severity of the broken leg is evident—a polished knob of bone sticking through the rotting flesh of its thigh—a debilitating injury that causes the creature to move with a profound dragging motion like a car missing a wheel. “Makes you wonder.”
“Yes, it does.” Lilly contemplates the awful, shuffling gate of the mud walker as it approaches, closing the distance to twenty-five yards. At this close proximity, the blackened teeth are apparent working inside its maw of a mouth, the rusty snore of a growl coming out of it like an engine. Lilly turns to Speed. “You want to do the honors?”
“Love to,” the thick-necked former football hero responds with cold indifference as he reaches for a crowbar wedged down the side of his backpack. The others watch calmly as Speed starts toward the oncoming creature. “Nice outfit,” he says to the thing as he walks up to it and rams the sharp end of the iron crowbar up through the roof of its mouth and into its frontal lobe.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 14
