The deep thud of the garage door banging down makes her jerk with a start.
She takes deep breaths, in through her nose, out through her mouth, swallowing back the horror. She wriggles her wrists, trying to keep the feeling in her hands, fighting the pinpricks of numbness setting in. Her stomach roils. One thing is certain: She doesn’t seem to be passing over into the afterlife as promised.
She’s not dying.
What the fuck?
The sound of another garage door going up makes her jump.
She hears Bob’s gravelly voice letting out a series of muted obscenities, the crackle of tape being ripped off his mouth, the praying, the sounds of struggle, more praying, and then … silence again. Footsteps. The booming thud of the garage door shutting.
Then Lilly hears the footsteps of the mercy killers receding down the corridor.
A moment later, a shroud of silence descends upon the sublevel.
Lilly tries to breathe through the terror. The silence is unbearable. It’s a leaden, pervasive, primal silence—the silence of the tomb—and Lilly starts to panic. Is she hallucinating all this in her death throes? Are Tommy and Bob gone already? Is she actually dead and having one of those brain glitches that mislead a victim into thinking she’s actually okay when her guts are about to spill out at any moment?
She tries to breathe as evenly as possible and get a grip on her emotions when she hears another sound coming from behind the wall between her and Bob.
At first, she thinks it’s merely the sound of Bob collapsing—a dull thud and a metallic clunk—as his chair tips and he slams down. Then she realizes she’s actually hearing a dragging noise crossing the neighboring service bay. Bob is moving. He’s dragging himself, perhaps while still shackled to the chair, toward the door.
What the fuck is going on? Lilly focuses more intensely on her shackles. She feels a wet sensation, which she assumes is blood from the constant wriggling and tugging at the restraints. One of her wrists begins to slip through its plastic cuff, the greasy lubrication from her own blood allowing it leeway, and she works it and works it, when all at once a sharp, metallic squeak makes her start.
The noise comes from Bob’s cell, and it has the effect of waking Lilly up. She calls out to him, “Bob!?”
“Coming, goddamn it!”
The raspy, whiskey-cured voice—barely audible behind inches of stone and ancient steel lath—reaches down into her soul. She’s not dreaming, and she’s not hallucinating. She actually hears Bob’s cranky, croaking bullfrog of a voice behind the wall. “Just hold your horses for a second!” the muffled voice admonishes her.
“Hurry!” Lilly gets one hand free of its shackle. Her wrist is deeply gashed from the frantic tugging, a thin runnel of blood creeping down her forearm. She can hear the adjacent garage door squeaking open on rusty tracks, followed by shuffling footsteps.
She leans forward and tries to reach the rope binding her ankles to the bottom of the chair, but with one hand still bound to the chair it’s impossible. “Bob, what’s going on? What are you doing?”
“Getting the kid!”
The voice comes from the opposite wall, as the sound of a second garage door squealing upward on oxidized runners penetrates the stone barrier. Lilly’s heart quickens. She can hear Tommy Dupree’s voice—thank God, thank God. Lilly tries to scoot her chair toward the door.
A moment later, her cell fills with the ratcheting squeak of her door being heaved upward.
“Jesus Christ, what did they do to you?” Bob exclaims as he lurches into her chamber, followed closely by Tommy. “You need a goddamn tourniquet!”
“It’s nothing, I did it to myself trying to slip the shackles.” Lilly holds her hand up, blood sticky on her skin. “Get me loose, Bob.”
He kneels, unfolds his pocketknife, and cuts her out of the wrist shackle and the ankle restraints.
She rubs her sore, oozing wrists while throwing a glance at Tommy. “You okay?”
He nods, evidently still in shock, his face as pale as wallpaper paste. “I’m okay, I guess. What did they just do to us?”
“I don’t know, Tommy.”
The boy frowns. “Wasn’t them things they fed us supposed to be poisoned?”
“That’s a good question.” Lilly looks at Bob. “What just happened?”
Bob has already moved across the room to the stack of tires in the corner. He quickly rifles through a pile of rags, some stray candy wrappers, and a discarded box of shotgun shells. “Bastards took our guns,” he grumbles. “They got every firearm in town now.”
“Bob, did you hear what I just said?” She lifts herself out of her chair. The room is still spinning, and she has to brace herself on the chair back. “What the hell is going on? What was in that water?”
Bob mumbles as he scans the room, “Water … that’s what was in it. Nothing but good old H2O.”
“Okay, I’m a little confused.” She looks at him. “What are you talking about?”
He turns to her and sighs. “I replaced the cyanide with water this morning before I showed it to you—just to be safe.”
She stares. All at once she remembers the plastic fuel container and the coil of rubber tubing that Bob had brought into the brownstone, sitting by the foot of the bed in Jeremiah’s bedroom—a fuel container filled with water—and it clicks in the back of Lilly’s mind, the moment when Bob flashed his little enigmatic smile at her right before they surrendered to the preacher’s men, and Bob’s whispered words that sank a hook into Lilly: I didn’t say anything about giving up.
“Bob Stookey, you’re a genius.” She grabs the older man by the shoulders, grins at him, and leans over and kisses him on the cheek.
“Only one problem,” he says, fixing his droopy, hound dog gaze on her, his expression as grim as a mortician. “Without weapons, we might as well fucking give up.”
TWENTY-FOUR
The sun surrenders the day at approximately seven thirty that night, the light sinking behind the treetops of neighboring bluffs, shooting radiant orange beams through the feathers of cottonwood and mist as thick as gauze. It’s a fitting sunset, a heartbreaking pastel elegy for the motley collection of souls now gathered on the edge of the speedway gardens—a total of twenty-three people standing hand in hand on the dusty warning track, faces upturned as though supplicating to God—some of them silently meditating, preparing themselves to leave one realm for another, others awaiting an unknown fate.
In addition to the ten members of Jeremiah’s itinerant flock, there are twelve Woodbury residents—including, of all people, Ben Buchholz—who have joined the communicants for the final ride into oblivion.
According to rumors whispered among the more religious of Woodbury’s citizens, Ben had his epiphany only hours ago—either a mystical conversion experience or a nervous breakdown, depending upon whom you ask—on the back steps of his apartment building on Pecan Street. Slobbering drunk, he slipped and careened down the stairs, and when he landed he was a different person. Jeremiah got to him first, comforting him and promising him eternal salvation and love. Ben broke into sobs, melting in the man’s arms like a lost child who has finally found his way home. It was the same sales pitch that the preacher had proffered throughout the day to the most faithful of Woodbury’s residents: “Come to our ‘Mega Communion’ tonight, seven o’clock sharp, with an open heart and a clean conscience, and you will be delivered from this hell. God will take your hand, and He will lead you into paradise.”
Jeremiah sees it as a truthful statement, not the bait-and-switch tactic that Harold Stauback accused him of perpetrating on these people, the allegation leveled at the preacher late that afternoon during a private meeting in the infirmary. Voices had been raised. Now Harold is one of three members of the Pentecostal People of God who are conspicuously absent on this glorious night. The other two absentees, Wade and Mark, are off on an important mission in the hills east of town. But the absence of these congregants will not dampen the ecstatic mood t
hat currently vibrates deep in the preacher’s marrow as he ascends the steps to the makeshift podium.
The rippling sounds of whispered amens and throats clearing nervously fade as the reverend moves behind a stack of tires bordered with wildflowers and wooden crosses. A small radio mike is clipped to his lapel. The setting sun puts a halo of golden light around his coiffed hair, his eyes filling up with emotion.
“MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS … TONIGHT WE CLOSE A CIRCLE. WE ARE READY.” His deep, rich, stentorian voice echoes out over the virgin soil and empty vestibules. His entire career—in fact, his whole miserable life—has been building up to this final sermon. Big Dan Garlitz would be proud. “WE HAVE—EACH AND EVERY ONE OF US—MADE PEACE WITH OUR MAKER. BROTHERS AND SISTERS, LET US PRAY.”
Some of the Woodbury people exchange nervous glances. They had expected some kind of mass baptism, or perhaps a sort of group induction into the preacher’s fold.
But now something seems amiss.
* * *
A mile to the west, in the high trees along Gainsburg Bluff, two members of the Pentecostal People of God crouch in the lengthening shadows, putting the finishing touches on the summoning.
Dusk has almost completely given over to night, and the drone of crickets and tree frogs engulfs Wade Pilcher and Mark Arbogast as they hurriedly fiddle with the knobs and switches of a small portable public address system—a relic from the old gospel revival shows, during which Jeremiah required amplification to reach the old folks on wheelchairs and mobility scooters in the back of the tent. About the size of a small dehumidifier, the battery-operated Heathkit PA system features a horn on top of a battered amplifier, and a remote receiver on the back that has just begun to blink green as the speaker starts to crackle with the sound of the preacher’s voice: “… AND ON THIS SACRED EVENING WE ASK THAT YOU ACCEPT EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOUR CHILDREN GATHERED HERE TONIGHT INTO YOUR BLESSED DOMINION…”
The ghostly, tinny voice of the preacher echoes out over the wooded knolls beyond Elkins Creek and Dripping Rock Road, swirling on the breeze like the call of a nighthawk. Wade and Mark glance at each other. Mark nods. Wade gazes out across the deep green patchwork of farm fields turning purple in the encroaching darkness. He raises his binoculars to his eyes and scans the surrounding landscape as the crackling hiss of the preacher’s voice reverberates off the far hills, beckoning the horde like a dog whistle.
“O LORD, WE ARE READY TO TOUCH THE HEM OF YOUR GARMENT. WE ARE READY. ANOINT US WITH YOUR GRACE AS WE ACCEPT THIS SACRAMENT…”
The echoing amplified voice penetrates the neighboring hollows, the wooded gulleys, and the dense groves of pines where the ragged figures hunker in the shadows, chewing at the air and clawing at the void. The noise disturbs them and coaxes them until they begin following the voice, the sound of it a homing beacon, a clarion, a summoning …
“… WE CAST OUR FATE TO YOU, O LORD, WE TAKE YOU INTO OUR HEARTS. HEAR OUR PRAYER, TAKE US TO THAT GOLDEN SHORE, COME AND TAKE US…”
In the distant woods, in the valleys and the hills, among the wreckage of deserted rural crossroads and from the depths of abandoned barns and grain elevators, more and more of the creatures are awakened, clumsily pivoting toward the sound, awkwardly climbing out of dry riverbeds and up muddy slopes, drawn to the promise of human flesh.
“… WE ARE COMING, O LORD, WE ARE ON THE EXPRESS TRAIN TO PARADISE…”
Wade looks at his watch. Less than fifteen minutes before the next stage of the summoning needs to be rolled out. He nods at Mark.
Then the two men hurriedly gather their knapsacks and weapons, and hurtle down the rocky, untrimmed path that wends its way back toward Woodbury.
It is now seven forty-six P.M. Eastern Standard Time.
* * *
A hush falls over the racetrack arena as the preacher begins to softly weep. He doesn’t make a big deal of it; he simply lowers his head and lets a single teardrop fall from the edge of his prominent chin as he continues: “THESE OFFERINGS, O LORD, REPRESENT THE FLESH AND BLOOD OF YOUR ONLY SON … SACRIFICED SO THAT WE MAY LIVE … A SYMBOL OF YOUR LOVE.”
Behind the preacher, Reese and Anthony appear in the shadowy mouth of a vestibule, each holding a stainless steel tray from the infirmary, each tray laden with sacraments like party favors.
Jeremiah feels the tension in the air tightening, and he channels it with the aplomb of a master conductor coaxing a performance from a symphony. “NOW, AS WE EACH COME FORWARD, ONE BY ONE, TO ACCEPT THE FLESH AND THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, WE REJOICE IN OUR LOVE OF YOU, O LORD, AND YOUR PROMISE OF EVERLASTING LIFE IN PARADISE.”
Some of the veteran church members move toward the front of the warning track now, their hands raised in the universal gesture of a true believer filled with the spirit—the gentle wave overhead, face turned downward in reverent ecstasy. The others fall in line behind them, single file, hands clasped in front of them as they await the morsels.
“LET US REJOICE, BROTHERS AND SISTERS, AS WE EACH ACCEPT THE SACRIFICIAL HOST, IN THE NAME OF GOD THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE HOLY SPIRIT…”
Jeremiah moves down the risers to the edge of the infield, the two tray carriers converging on him, holding the poisoned offerings for his inspection.
“WE NOW GIVE OUR LIVES OVER TO YOU, O LORD,” Jeremiah sings out in his musical baritone voice, as he turns to a tray and plucks the first wafer of tainted unleavened bread. “IN HONOR OF ALL OUR LOVED ONES WHO HAVE FALLEN, WE ACCEPT THIS COMMUNAL HOST.”
The first communicant steps up to the edge of the bleachers.
Old Joe Bressler, the seventy-three-year-old retiree who helped the women of the church group prepare the sacramental food and drink in the back kitchen of the Dew Drop Inn, now stands trembling on arthritic knees before the preacher. The man’s deeply lined face cants upward. He closes his eyes and opens his toothless mouth, his upper dentures stained and foul smelling. Jeremiah places the host on the man’s tongue, and Joe closes his mouth around the morsel and gums it for a moment before swallowing it.
The smile that appears on Joe’s face speaks volumes. Here is a man who ran a grocery store for forty-three years in Tallahassee’s tough Frenchtown area, who looked the other way when the poor kids from the neighborhood came in to steal diapers and formula, who ran off counterfeit food stamps for some of the local mothers, who was married to the same woman for almost fifty years, childless, and yet devoted to his Ida, and the love he had for her lasted right up until the day she turned and he had to stove her head in with a garden hoe. The smile that creases this weathered, parchmentlike face is a smile of release, a swan song from a man who has lived the fullest life one could imagine.
Jeremiah smiles back at the man, exultant in the knowledge that the strong barbiturate will knock the old codger out before the cyanide fully kicks in, sparing the man any pain in his last moments.
“Hallelujah, Brother!” Joe exclaims, a crumb of cracker still clinging to his liver-colored lip. “Praise the Lord!”
Jeremiah pulls the old man into a warm embrace and whispers to him, “You’ll be the first to touch the hem of his robe, Brother.” Then Jeremiah turns to the other tray, takes one of the paper cups, and hands it to the man. “Down the hatch, Joseph.”
Joe knocks back the tepid fluid that he expects will finally bring his long, full life to a close. He hands the empty cup back. “God bless you, Brother,” Joe says with tears welling up in his eyes.
He steps aside and heads back to his place on the warning track.
The next congregant steps up.
The Dupree children—Lucas and Bethany—are the sixth and seventh in line.
* * *
The signal is supposed to come from Lilly. She hides behind one of the gigantic load-bearing pillars in the upper stands on the opposite side of the racetrack. She is supposed to fire off a single shot at the appointed time, which will cue the rest of her little band of insurgents to engage the crowd. Drenched in sweat, pulse pounding in her ears, she tries to breathe normally and st
ay calm as she watches the proceedings. She can see the preacher on the other side of the infield, down on the edge of the warning track, conducting his ritual in the dying light, giving the crackers and the drinks to each of his subjects as the drone of voices offer amen and hallelujah. Lilly has seen documentary footage of Jonestown, has read about suicide cults down through the years, but she would never have expected the real thing to appear so … still. So tranquil. Even the children seem delighted to accept this symbolic communion amid this horrible plague. Maybe it’s some kind of twisted version of mob psychology. Or perhaps it’s simply what happens when people are beaten down by a plague this horrible for this long. The truth is, Lilly has no idea how many of these congregants are even aware of the suicide pact.
Now Lilly grips her crappy .45 semiauto pistol with white-knuckle nervous tension and simmering rage. Her anger—tempered by the unresolved grief of losing Calvin—is exacerbated by the pitiful quality of her new gun. The weapon was scavenged that afternoon in a frantic search of the ruins of the burned-out National Guard station. Bob found it in a previously undiscovered underground bomb shelter, along with some military-grade shotguns and extra rounds of ammunition. But Lilly has no idea how long the guns were down there or if this piece of junk even fires properly. She has eight rounds in the pistol and one additional clip with ten extra rounds in it, and that’s it.
The rest of the insurgents are positioned at key junctures around the arena with minimal firepower. David Stern and Speed Wilkins have the only fully automatic assault rifles in the group, while Gloria Pyne has her trusty Glock, and Barbara Stern her .38 Police Special—neither handgun very effective from a long distance. Matthew and Bob each have a shotgun—Bob sporting a 12-gauge, and Matthew a 20-gauge scattergun—neither weapon necessarily designed for long-range applications. All told, their meager arsenal is not much of a match for the firearms and ordnance the church group has amassed.
All of which is why Lilly—despite her fog of rage—has convinced her team to hold their fire unless absolutely necessary. The plan is to wait for the moment Jeremiah and the others realize nobody is shuffling off this mortal coil as planned, and both the barbiturate and the poison seem to be neutralized and ineffective—that will be the optimum time to intercede. Maybe Jeremiah will see the failure of the poison to do its work as an act of God. Maybe he’ll interpret it as a sign. But in his confusion, he’ll be more manageable. He’ll listen to reason.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 26
