Once Lilly reaches the rotunda ledge, David and Tommy help her pull the ladder up—surrendering the streets of Woodbury to the dead.
TWENTY-EIGHT
The light of dawn illuminates the town gradually, revealing the siege in painful, excruciating stages. First, the horizon over the train yard warms up with a faint gray light, revealing just enough of the neighboring vacant lots and fallow fields to see the area abounding with figures. Initially appearing as moving blankets of shadows, the gathering light begins to show the countless bobbing heads jockeying for position along the tracks, down Main Street, and along the storefronts and condos of Pecan and Durand Streets. It looks like a convention in hell, a Mardi Gras of the dead, as the biter horde fills every nook and cranny, mills along every side street, loiters in every alcove. The sun-blanched lawns along Flat Shoals Road, once tidy little plots of land bordered by picket fences, now crawl with moving cadavers. Even the arena gardens are standing room only—the errant corpses trampling through the precious vegetable crop, aimlessly circling the warning track, and crowding every vestibule. Some of the walkers even trudge back and forth up in the stands, restlessly wandering between bleachers as though by muscle memory, as if looking for lost children or forgotten purses. Here and there stagger brittle, scorched specimens—victims of the big burn a few weeks ago—trailing ash and spoor behind them. The collective droning lamentations rise up like crashing waves, and the combined stench of the multitude hangs in the air like an invisible fog—an ocean of feces, pus, and tar.
In fact, the smell is so overwhelming that most of the survivors clinging to the capital dome of the courthouse building have taken off articles of clothing in the humid Georgia heat and wrapped them around their noses and mouths like makeshift biohazard masks.
“I have to go pee!” Lucas Dupree informs Gloria Pyne on one end of the narrow rotunda. The boy has a piece of shirttail tied around the lower part of his face, so his meek little voice is muffled and almost inaudible in the winds. The ledge is less than three feet wide, but, mercifully, someone thought of installing a small decorative guardrail that winds around the entire circumference. The railing has prevented numerous accidents with the children, as some of them have tried to scale the dome in order to see over the tops of the neighboring woods and maybe send an SOS to whoever might be out there.
“Let him do it around back,” Barbara advises from a few feet away. She sits on the ledge between Bethany Dupree and one of the Slocum girls, a damp rag in her gnarled hand, the breeze tossing her wild gray curls. She turns to Bethany and says, “Open wide, sweetheart.”
Bethany leans her head back and Barbara squeezes a few drops of water from her bandanna—sopped up from the dew that’s collected on the roof tiles—into the little girl’s parched mouth. The child’s lips are so dry, cracked, and chapped they’re starting to bleed. The girl swallows the water and looks at Barbara. “That’s it, that’s all the water I get?”
“That’s it, I’m afraid,” Barbara says, throwing a worried glance across the rooftop at her husband, who sits shirtless and cross-legged on the ledge, his head wrapped in a makeshift turban of fabric ripped from his chambray shirt. His rifle is cradled across his lap as he stares longingly off into the distant hills.
David Stern knows they’re in deep, deep trouble, and when he turns and looks at Lilly, who sits next to him, he sees the anxiety on her face as well.
“We’ll figure something out,” she murmurs, speaking more to herself than anyone else. After a day and a night on the roof, her fair skin is already beginning to burn, her neck and cheeks as pink as boiled lobster. She stares at the far northern reaches of Main Street, making note of the scores of monsters trampling the delicate flower bed she planted in front of her building, and feels a sinking sensation that’s almost breathtaking. For some reason, those flowers getting stomped is more of an indicator of doom than anything else she has seen from up here.
Tommy sits next to her, compulsively whittling a stick with Harold Stauback’s pocketknife, a bandanna wrapped around his nose and mouth. The boy hasn’t said much since they ended up on the roof, but Lilly can tell by the glint of pain in his gaze that he’s hurting inside.
Harold stands behind the boy, bracing himself on a copper gutter tarnished with a patina of weather and bird droppings. Even holding a handkerchief to his mouth, his belly distended above his belt, Harold has a rakish, dapper air to him. He has done more to keep their spirits up than anyone else, casually singing folk songs and gospel tunes, telling anecdotes of growing up the son of a sharecropper in Florida, and entertaining the kids with magic tricks. But even Harold is starting to show the fatigue.
Gloria takes Lucas around the ledge to the back of the rooftop.
The little boy stands at the top of the fire escape, unzipping his Oshkosh overalls and gazing down at the crowd of cadavers milling about the loading dock area. The wind tosses litter across the scarred pavement as the monsters awkwardly pace, rubbing against each other, so tightly packed that they look like a school of ghastly fish. Some of them hear noises from up on the roof and tilt their nickel-plated eyes up at the child.
The kid proceeds to urinate down upon the creatures.
Gloria watches, her expression grim and distracted. Dehydration has thinned and weakened the boy’s stream, but he has enough liquid to get the walkers’ attention. The monsters snap their feral gazes up at the sky as though baffled by the sudden rainfall. Unsmiling, the boy watches the urine pattering off the tops of their ragged heads, trickling down their emaciated forms. Apparently the child finds no humor in it, no pleasure, no mischievous charge.
Just morbid fascination.
* * *
They hear the noises later that afternoon. Harold is the first to register the sounds, whirling around toward the trapdoor embedded in the side of the dome, instinctively pulling his .45-caliber Smith & Wesson and pointing it at the door. “What in the Sam Hill is that?” he says, the muzzle of his revolver trembling slightly.
Lilly springs to her feet, David hauling himself off the ledge and bringing the barrel of the AR-15 up. The others back away on either side of the ledge, staring at the congealed ancient trapdoor. The kids are particularly petrified by the banging and squeaking noises coming from inside the building, echoing up the staircase inside the hatch. Can walkers climb stairs? Nobody is quite sure what the answer is to that one, but what they are certain of is that most buildings in town have been breached and infested by the dead.
“Everybody just take it easy,” Lilly says loud enough to be heard above the wind. “It’s probably nothing.”
“It doesn’t sound like nothing,” Gloria utters, holding one of the younger children against her chest, the child’s eyes radiating terror.
“Them things can’t climb steps, can they?” Harold’s rhetorical question hangs in the wind like a toxic gas.
“Some of them things managed to climb the speedway bleachers,” Gloria counters.
“Everybody stay calm.” David points his rifle at the door, nodding at the rusted, oxidized, fossilized brass handle. “Even if they get to the top of the stairs, they’ll never get that door open.”
The muffled noises intensify as they rise closer and closer to the roof: shuffling, creaking footsteps climbing toward the inner door. It’s impossible to tell if it’s a single walker or a dozen of them shambling up the iron risers. Lilly stares at the brass knob. The service door hasn’t been used for generations. Embedded in the side of the dome, mossy with barnacles of age and bird shit, the door once served janitors and workmen when the courthouse was enjoying its glory days. “Barbara, just in case,” Lilly says, throwing a glance across the ledge at the gray-haired matron, “why don’t you take the kids around to the back of the roof.”
Barbara and Gloria do as instructed, slowly ushering the half dozen little people around behind the dome. Even Tommy sheepishly hands Lilly the pocketknife and goes with the kids, gladly leaving the business of dealing with the attackers to the
adults.
Meanwhile, the noises have risen to the point of being only a few feet away. Scraping, shuffling sounds move awkwardly behind the door, and then pause, and then a loud thud makes everybody on the roof jerk with a start. “David, be ready to fire controlled bursts,” Lilly says in a flat, terrified monotone.
“Got it.” David moves in tight, holding the muzzle only inches away from the door.
Another thud makes the door shudder and sends a puff of plaster off its hinge.
“Make every shot count,” Lilly says, standing next to Harold. She has no gun but that doesn’t stop her from holding Harold’s knife aloft, poised for action.
Harold grips his .45 with both hands, aiming it at the door.
Thud!
“Ready … set…”
The door bursts open, and a deeply lined, haggard face peers out at them. “What the hell are you people doing up here … sunbathing?”
“Oh, my God,” Lilly utters breathlessly, struck dumb by the twinkling eyes staring back at her.
Bob Stookey’s hair is greasier than ever, his denim sodden with filth as though he’s been crawling around a tar pit or an archaeological dig for the last week. He grins at the others and his eyes gleam with emotion in folds of crow’s-feet. “You people ready to come down from here, or should I go get some Coppertone and join you?”
TWENTY-NINE
They have a million questions for him, and he assures them there will be plenty of time to answer each and every one of them, but right now he has to figure out a way to get twelve people past the walker-infested first floor to the service elevator shaft, and then down the treacherous access steps to the sublevel, and then through the secret door into the interconnecting passageway, and finally into the main branch of his beloved Underground Railroad tunnels.
Barbara and Gloria keep the kids as silent as possible by playing let’s see who can be completely quiet for the longest, the winner to be awarded a year’s supply of cherry Kool-Aid—and Bob uses an age-old diversionary tactic of throwing a burned-out lightbulb across the courthouse foyer, the sudden noise of the shattering glass loud enough to draw the walkers away from the bank of elevators in the rear of the building for a crucial minute or two.
They barely get every last person down the service steps before the creatures catch wind and start lumbering after them. Bob stabs a crowbar through the eye socket of the closest biter, slams the doors to the elevator shaft in the faces of a dozen more, and then climbs down behind Harold into the darkness of the sublevel. It takes another ten minutes to pass through the connecting passageway and reach the main tunnel.
Along the way, Bob leads the group through six inches of stagnant water rife with festering garbage and slithering things that elicit a howl of terror from a different child every few minutes as the water bugs or miscellaneous vermin brush past their exposed ankles.
“My hand to God,” Bob says to Lilly as he leads the group around the corner of intersecting tunnels lined with slimy brick, the moldering walls flickering in the distant orange light of torches. “When I fell through the floor of that culvert, I actually experienced the luckiest break of my miserable life.”
“And that would be what?” Lilly asks, unable to stifle her grin, still giddy and reeling from the emotional roller coaster of discovering her friend alive. Her tattered T-shirt is now so filthy and sweat stained it has transitioned from light blue to toilet-water gray, and she feels the old claustrophobia tickling at her nerve endings, making her scalp crawl, but it’s buffered by the sheer joy, relief, and gratitude for something finally going their way. She realizes that Woodbury as a community—her dream home—may be gone, but the only things that really matter in a community are the people, and she still has a good group of people by her side. The others walk behind her, the children exhausted and yet spurred on by fear and anticipation, David bringing up the rear behind the group with his AR-15 cradled in his arms.
“I fell right on top of them sons a bitches, cracked one of their skulls right off the bat.”
“Get outta town, you did no such thing.”
“Lilly, I would not shit you,” he says, grinning at her. “After all, you’re my favorite turd.”
She gives him a good-natured punch in the arm. “Watch the language in front of the kids.”
Bob shrugs. “I’ll have to work on that.” Then he lets out a chuckle and keeps walking. “Anyhoo … one of them bastards got his skull crushed underneath me, and I managed to get that little old knife in the noggins of the two females pretty dern quick.” His smile fades. “Not even sure I knew what I was doing … was kinda on autopilot there for a while.”
“I can imagine.” Lilly sees another bend in the tunnel ahead of them and something glowing beyond it. A fire? Torches? Oddly, it looks almost incandescent. “So how did you get from there to here?”
Another shrug from Bob. “I don’t know exactly. I guess I been studying that damn land survey so much in the past month or so I kinda memorized the dern thing. I took off running through the sewer, and it was probably a blessing in disguise that I got lost.”
“How do you mean?”
“All of a sudden I started noticing things that looked familiar, tributaries of the sewer that seemed to crisscross the main conduit I been working on for weeks. Anyway, I found my way back to the main branch.” He points up ahead. “It’s up here just a piece, not much farther now.”
He leads the group around the bend, and about fifty yards away, Lilly sees a dusty cage light hanging down on a heavy-duty cable. The light glows. “Wait a minute,” she says and pauses. The others stop and stare. Lilly can’t believe what she’s seeing. “How did you do that?”
Bob gives her another shrug. “Good ol’ American ingenuity.”
* * *
The section of tunnel transformed by Bob’s handiwork and ingenuity over the last five weeks spans nearly the length of a football field, and is about eight or nine feet wide, maybe seven feet high—a long, narrow chamber of crates, propane tanks, and small appliances that recalls an enormous galley on a giant submarine. The walls have been adorned with maps, corkboards, and art prints, and a patchwork of carpet remnants and secondhand rugs runs down the center of the floor in order to make the space homier. At regular intervals, card tables and pedestals have shaded lamps on them, their sixty-watt bulbs glowing genially over stacks of books and magazines taken from the library. The cumulative effect of the space is cozy, inviting, and maybe even a little surreal.
Upon closer scrutiny, however, it’s the technological touches that truly impress Lilly and the other adults as they slowly enter the sanctuary and gaze in wonder at the metal housings along the walls containing small generators, which are softly rumbling, their exhaust pipes retrofitted from furnace ducts and channeled upward to ventilation shafts in the stalactite ceiling. Here and there, a few strands and bundles of electrical cords run down the walls like vines, connecting up with duplex outlets, and every hundred feet or so a portable fan circulates air. For the longest time, Lilly is speechless. At last, she takes Bob by the arm, as the others collapse onto trundle beds and armchairs, and the kids start inspecting the shelves on which rows of canned goods, cereals, and various nonperishable treats like beef jerky and vitamin water are neatly arrayed.
Lilly leads Bob to the end of the tunnel—the terminus point marked by a wall of chain link, freshly painted a bright Rust-Oleum blue—and she speaks softly, almost under her breath, so that the others won’t hear. “When did you do all this?”
Bob gives her another one of his customary shrugs. “I guess I did most of it while them Holy Rollers were taking over the place, but I didn’t do it all by my lonesome.” He jerks a thumb at the others. “Dave and Barb helped me round up the machinery, wire the place up, figure out the ventilation and exhaust systems. Gloria was sorta my interior decorator, I guess you could say.”
“It’s incredible, Bob.” Lilly gazes at the shadows of the deeper tunnels on the other side of the cyclone fe
ncing. “This will definitely tide us over until we can get the town back from the walkers.”
Bob awkwardly looks at the ground, licking his lips and choosing his words carefully. “Yeah, um … we should talk about that.”
Lilly looks up at him. “What’s the matter?”
Bob takes a deep breath. “Woodbury’s gone, Lilly-girl.”
“What?”
“It’s as gone as a wrecked ship on the bottom of the ocean.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
He gives her a paternal pat on the shoulder. “It’s the way of the world nowadays, Lilly. You lose a place to them shit bags, you move on.”
“That’s ridiculous.” She looks back at the far recesses of the tunnel. “We can rebuild the town, clean up the place, start over, give these kids a place to grow up.”
He holds her by the shoulders until their gazes lock. “This is our new home.” He has never looked as serious as he does right now. “Woodbury has turned, Lilly.”
“Bob—”
“Listen to me, it’s turned just as sure as one of them things up there used to be an ordinary person … the town has turned. Them things are inside the buildings now, they’re everywhere. It’s goddamn Chernobyl up there. You ain’t gonna be cleaning anything up, Lilly, or rebuilding anything, it’s gone … dead and gone.”
She stares at him for a moment, words failing her. “I … I can’t even breathe down here.” She looks back through the fence. “How am I gonna live in this sardine can, Bob? With my condition?”
He puts his arm around her. “Lilly, we got a truck load of Xanax, Ambien … Valium, even. And when we run out, we can move around the county underground without risking our asses, and we can find more drugs. And supplies and medicine and food and whatever else we need, for that matter.”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 29
