The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  “Not the biggest library in the world, I’ll grant you that,” Bob goes on, still looking at the pile of publications with the admiration of a proud father gazing upon a gifted child. “But still … you don’t need the Internet to find stuff in there.” He looks at Lilly. “I shit you not—they got old daily newspapers here dating back to the Eisenhower administration.”

  “Are you gonna tell me what this is all about, or do I have to guess?”

  He sighs and paces around his dining table on which an impressive array of documents is stacked and organized. “Your boy has been quite a busy little beaver in his life, made quite a name for himself down to Florida and thereabouts.” Bob stares at Lilly. “That’s right … I got the scoop on your honorable Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz.”

  Lilly lets out an exasperated breath. “Bob, whatever it is … I’m sure it’s ancient history. In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t look at people’s résumés anymore.”

  Bob continues pacing as though he hasn’t heard a word she has said. “Evidently he was a military brat as a kid, an only child, shuffled from school to school.”

  “Bob—”

  “Best I can tell, his daddy was an overbearing cocksucker—a chaplain in the army—known for being a hard-ass, paddling his recruits with a metal baseball bat he called the Bethlehem Slugger.” Bob shoots a sidelong glance at Lilly. “Cute, huh?”

  “Bob, I don’t see how any of this—”

  “I guess young Jeremiah never fit in, always an outcast, a misfit. Got the stuffing beat outta him on the playground a lot, but it made him tough, resourceful. Became a Golden Gloves boxer, saw visions of the apocalypse, entered the clergy at age eighteen and became the youngest Baptist minister ever to establish a megachurch in the state of Florida.” Bob pauses for emphasis. “And then there’s a lot missing … a big hole in the biography.”

  Lilly looks at the old medic. “Are you finished?”

  “No, I ain’t. As a matter of fact, I’m just getting started.” He points at the pile of publications. “Best I can tell from the paper trail, he was given the boot by the deacons at the Universal Church of the Pentecost in Jacksonville, stripped of his license, drummed out of the state of Florida. You know why?”

  Lilly sighs. “No, Bob … I have no idea why he was kicked out of the state of Florida.”

  “That’s funny, neither do I!” Bob’s droopy, red-rimmed eyes blaze with the latent buzz and paranoia of a dry drunk. “It’s all been redacted by lawyers or the church or whatever. But I guarantee it has something to do with what they’re calling the End Days … Armageddon. Judgment Day, Lilly. The big kiss-off.”

  “Bob, I really gotta be honest with you … I just don’t have the energy for this right now.”

  “Don’t you see the pattern? That’s why he was wandering around the South with no church to speak of at the time the Turn came around!” Bob wipes his mouth. He looks badly in need of a drink. “It’s unclear from the public record, but it looks like they found something … something in his possessions, maybe a diary, photographs, something incriminating, a smoking gun … something.”

  “What are you saying exactly? You think he’s a fucking child molester?”

  “No … I mean, I don’t know … maybe it’s something else.” Bob paces some more. “I just wouldn’t trust him farther than I can spit.” Bob pauses and looks at her. “You remember them huge duffel bags? The one he was carrying … and the other one, kid named Steve was luggin’?”

  Lilly shrugs. “I guess … yeah, I remember them. So what? They had heavy duffel bags.”

  “You seen them things since they been staying here with us?”

  Another shrug from Lilly as she thinks about it. “I guess I haven’t. So what?”

  “What’s in them things?” Bob stares at her. “Ain’t you the slightest bit curious?”

  Lilly clenches her jaw and lets out another taut breath through her nose. She knows this salty old medic better than anyone else, maybe better than Bob knows himself. Over the last two years, Lilly and old Bob Stookey have become the closest of friends, sharing their deepest, innermost secrets, sharing their tragedies, their dreams, and their fears. She also knows that Bob—not unlike the preacher himself—grew up dirt-poor, abused as a kid by deeply religious parents. As an adult, Bob developed an abiding hatred of evangelists, which is now coloring his every thought. With this in mind, Lilly finally says, “Bob, I’m gonna cut you some slack here because of your issues with organized religion … but I really think you need to take a breath, step back, and dial it down. You don’t have to like this guy. Hell, you don’t even have to talk to him. I’ll deal with him. But I’m begging you to drop the fucking witch hunt.”

  Bob stares at her for a moment. “You don’t even care about finding out what’s in them goddamn duffel bags?”

  Lilly lets out a sigh, goes over to him, reaches up and tenderly touches the edge of his grizzled chin. “I’m gonna go ahead and get back to the party now.” She gives him a tepid smile. “I’m really tired … and I need to kick back and put my mind on autopilot. My advice to you is to do the same. Just let it go. Concentrate on the future, the tunnels, the fuel situation.”

  She pats his cheek, turns, and heads for the door. He watches her. Before leaving, she pauses in the doorway, turns, and looks at him. “Let it go, Bob. I promise you … you’ll be glad you did.”

  She walks out, shutting the door behind herself, the dull clunk of the bolt reverberating in the silence.

  * * *

  Over the next week, a casual observer might conclude that the town of Woodbury, Georgia—a place once heralded on water towers and welcome signs as “A Peach of a Place”—has begun to experience the greatest renaissance since the completion of the Norfolk and Southern Railroad trunk line in 1896. For the most part, the walkers leave the town alone, staying well to the west of Elkins Creek, and allowing the people of Woodbury to finish the expansion of the wall. With the added manpower provided by the church group, the barricade is extended north along Canyon Road, all the way to Whitehouse Parkway, and then east to Dogwood Lane. The expansion adds a dozen more freestanding homes, as well as scores of unexplored stores into the safe zone. One of the key windfalls is a small auto parts shop on Dogwood called Cars Et Cetera—previously only hastily scanned by the Governor’s men for valuable provisions—now offered up as a gold mine of hidden treasures and supplies.

  Reverend Jeremiah James Garlitz takes his place beside Lilly at all town council meetings and brings a refreshing dynamic to the planning sessions. The council institutes new programs to expand farming activities, standardize reconnaissance runs, establish a new political manifesto for the town, draw up a set of rights and responsibilities, create new regulations and curfews, and explore all possible technologies that might bring sustainability to their community. Lilly and the preacher assign teams to build an aquifer to gather rainfall for irrigation and drinking water, build compost heaps for fertilizer, and begin searching the immediate rural area for all green technologies that they might scavenge. By the end of that week, they’ve discovered a previously unexplored warehouse in the neighboring county filled with mint-condition solar cells and small wind turbines.

  The reverend seems to embrace his new role with gusto. He begins having regular interdenominational prayer services and performing baptisms. Calvin Dupree, a lifelong Baptist, has never experienced the old-fashioned immersion ceremony and asks the preacher if he can be the first citizen of Woodbury to be baptized. Jeremiah is delighted to oblige, and Lilly proudly stands with the three Dupree children one evening at dusk along the banks of Elkins Stream—the same place Meredith Dupree took her own life so heroically. They choose a spot under a massive ancient hickory, and Harold Stauback sings a hymn as Jeremiah puts one arm around the white-robed Calvin and slowly, ritually, lowers him backward into the warm, mossy currents. Lilly surprises herself when she realizes, as she watches, that she has tears of deep emotion on her face.

  Nobod
y notices the subtle yet seismic shift in the moods of all the church people. To the uninitiated, untrained eye, they appear as if they have accepted their new home with gratitude and serene satisfaction. Upon closer scrutiny, however, one might begin to question the beatific smiles on their faces, the glassy, almost drugged quality of their gazes. In this brutal era, with death around every corner, nobody ever gets this happy without the assistance of heavy medication. But the members of the Pentecostal People of God—almost to a person—appear to be getting more and more blissful and exultant with each passing day. And not a single one of their fellow residents—including Bob Stookey—even suspects that some great and epochal event in their lives is approaching.

  For most of that week, in fact, Bob is too distracted by his obsession with the gigantic duffel bags—if indeed they still exist at all and haven’t been thrown out or destroyed—to notice the minute changes in demeanor among the church people.

  Most nights, Bob waits until the folks have retired to their bedrooms, then surreptitiously creeps around town, casually peering through windows, stealing glimpses inside tents, and checking the storage areas under the fire escapes and stairways of apartment buildings. They have moved Jeremiah a few times, first putting him up at the Governor’s old building at the end of Main Street, then upgrading him to one of the bungalows along Jones Mill Road, finally moving him to the brownstone-style building across the street from Lilly. The other duffel bag—presumably in the possession of the young church member named Stephen—has also vanished. Bob searched the young man’s apartment one morning when the kid was away on a work crew and came up empty.

  Bob hasn’t had a chance to break into the preacher’s current digs—but he will, he promises himself he will; when the time is right, Bob will check the place across from Lilly’s for any sign of the mysterious bags.

  For now, Bob spends his days in the tunnel, reinforcing the walls and refurbishing the dingy passageway into a more livable space. He enlists the help of David and Barbara—the only residents other than Lilly whom Bob trusts unconditionally—and starts experimenting with solar cells and generators in order to get electrical power and, in turn, lights and ventilation into the tunnels. He successfully powers nearly a quarter mile of the main branch with a half dozen cells positioned in trees along the route, an array of batteries and cables cannibalized out of wrecked cars, and three heavy-duty generators that he positions aboveground, waterproofed and rigged to run on biodiesel. Bob concocts his own home-brewed version of the fuel by mixing old cooking oil, a small amount of gasoline, methanol from an antifreeze called Heet (found at the auto parts store), and a few gallons of Drano (which contains sodium hydroxide). By the end of that week, nearly fifteen hundred feet of tunnel have become a clean, well-lighted, and odorless place to hide from the world.

  On Friday, late in the evening, Bob is in the tunnel, alone, exploring the farthest reaches of that main branch—using his survey map to notate the points at which the local sewer begins to intersect with the passageway—when he hears a noise. Muffled voices are resonating faintly in the dark, coming from aboveground somewhere, apparently close by. Bob finds a tributary and follows the sound of the voices down a parallel tunnel, which he calculates must be under the woods east of town, right around the swampy creek in which Calvin Dupree was baptized.

  He pauses in the dark, the voices clearly audible now, directly overhead. The flesh on the back of his neck prickles when he recognizes the preacher’s silky baritone.

  “All I’m saying is, when the time comes, make sure we leave no one behind.”

  Perfectly audible in the tomblike silence and darkness of the tunnel, Jeremiah’s voice sounds as though it’s coming down through a drain.

  A second voice—younger, thinner, reedier—sounds as though it’s coming from a pull-string doll: “I just want to make sure I understand—you’re gonna go ahead and take all these nonbelievers with us.” This voice is also instantly identifiable: the young fellow who first stumbled into Woodbury from the wilderness, the one named Reese. Bob’s flesh crawls. His gut turns cold. He feels light-headed, his mouth as dry as an ashtray as he listens to the deep twang of the preacher’s response.

  “We owe it to these people, Brother, we owe them a trip home with us. They are children of God, just like us, they deserve to touch the hem of His garment as much as we do. They are good souls.”

  A single pearl of sweat tracks down the bridge of Bob’s nose.

  The voice Bob has identified as Reese’s proclaims: “Praise God, and praise to you. You’re a generous man, Brother.” There’s a pause, and it makes Bob feel as though he’s shrinking, as though he’s sinking into the tunnel floor, into the molten center of the earth. “But what if they resist?”

  “Yessir, some of them are gonna fight it. No doubt about that. They won’t want to go, they won’t see the glory in it, but we will overcome that. We’ll educate them. And if we can’t educate them…”

  “Then what? What do we do then? How do we get them to go home all at once?”

  “Gotta be very careful, Brother Reese. And we gotta do it soon. We gotta get on home before somebody takes it the wrong way, tries to interfere.”

  “Whatever you say, Brother J.”

  “These are good people, Reese, decent people, God’s people. I will do anything to convince them, and the Good Lord will not let anybody stop us from going home. If they try and stop us, we’ll just go around them, under them, over them, or through them. Whatever it takes.”

  “Amen.”

  “Glory hallelujah. We’re going home, Brother Reese. At last, at last. And there ain’t nobody gonna get in our way this time.”

  “Yessir, amen. Amen.”

  “It’s set, then. We take our leave tomorrow night. Look at me, Reese. Tomorrow night. Twenty-four hours … and then we take these good people home.”

  “Amen!”

  NINETEEN

  Later. Wee-hour darkness, like a pall, lowering its membrane of chill silence over the town. A single figure moving through the maze of side streets, a single red blood cell seeking out a diseased organ.

  Bob Stookey slips between two buildings on Pecan Street and moves through the gloom with his flashlight off. He knows this part of town almost by feel. He used to hide out here, right here, hunkering down with a bottle of bourbon and bad memories and crashing right on the cement under that same fire escape. Now he passes the spot in a dark blur.

  He finds the preacher’s quarters on the ground floor of the brownstone at the end of Main, the one across from Lilly’s place. He approaches it from the back alley and silently crosses the patio to the rear door. He knows the preacher is away for the night, meeting with his elders in the forest, making his plans, getting everybody on board for whatever it is they’re planning. Bob knows that time is not on his side here—the preacher could return at any moment—so he quickly jimmies the back door with a locksmith’s tool.

  He goes inside and gets to work. Flashlight on now, scanning the cluttered dark, heart beating hard, he looks in the closets, on the shelves, under the sofa, and finally, under the big brass bed in the bedroom, he locates the infamous duffel bag.

  He sucks in a breath, girding himself as he pulls the heavy satchel out.

  * * *

  On the second floor of the courthouse building, in the back room, which is now as dark as the inside of a stew pot, fragrant with the body odors of children, a five-year-old boy named Lucas Dupree tosses and writhes in a tangle of damp sheets. His brother Tommy sleeps soundly on a trundle bed on the other side of the room, his sister slumbering on a love seat in the corner. Lucas dreams he’s in the backyard of his grandparents’ place in Birmingham, Alabama, hiding in his grammy’s rosebushes. It is very real. He smells the sour odors of fertilizer and dog shit, feels the matted pine needles prickling the palms of his hands and the pads of his knees as he crawls through the dark, searching for his mom. He knows he’s playing hide-and-seek even though he can’t remember the beginning
of the game.

  Dreams are like that. You just know stuff. Like the fact that his mama is dead but she still wants to play, so he crawls toward an opening in the bush and sees his mom crouching on the grass by the clothesline, her back turned to him. She counts to ten in a crackly, robotic voice—“seven, eight, nine, ten”—and then she turns.

  Her teeth are black, her eyes like the red cinnamon eyes of a gingerbread man, her skin as rough and gray as stale bread dough. Lucas screams, but no sound comes out of him. He freezes as his undead mother strides over to him. She kneels. At first Lucas thinks she’s going to eat him.

  Then she leans down and whispers something to him. He hears it like water trickling next to his ear—a very important message.

  * * *

  Kneeling next to the old brass bed in the dark bedroom, Bob unzips the enormous duffel bag and sees the bottles. At least a dozen laboratory-grade beakers sealed with plastic lids and scientific labels are tucked in there like milk bottles ready for delivery.

  Bob fumbles for his reading glasses. He finds them in the breast pocket of his denim shirt and puts them on. He leans in and shines the flashlight on the label. It says CHLORAL HYDRATE—1000 ML—DANGER—KEEP OUT OF THE REACH OF CHILDREN. Bob’s pulse quickens.

  He finds other beakers ranging from 50 to 100 mL. These containers are labeled HYDROGEN CYANIDE—DANGER—EXTREMELY POISONOUS.

  Bob sits back and lets a thin breath escape his tightly pressed lips. He hardly notices the other contents of the duffel: cakes of C-4 plastic explosives wrapped in wax paper, detonating cord rolled into tiny coils, and bundles of dynamite sticks packed as neatly as silverware in a drawer.

  His gaze remains glued to those glass containers of deadly clear fluids. Bob is a former army medic, a man well versed in basic chemistry and pharmacology. He knows that chloral hydrate is a strong barbiturate and he also knows the devastating effects of cyanide.

  Bob gets very still and tries to get air into his lungs. He knows now just exactly where the good reverend’s suicide cult will be taking everybody tomorrow night.