The Walking Dead: Search and Destroy

by Robert Kirkman

  She manages to break through the paralysis and roll a few inches until she falls off the edge of the gurney.

  She lands hard on the floor, an IV stick taped to her wrist tugging painfully at her, the air knocked out of her, a shooting star slashing through her vision. The room spins. She tries to sit up, tries to turn her head, tries to take in the rest of the room and figure out where the hell she is, but her body won’t cooperate. The sensation—the way her entire being feels like a hollowed-out log—makes her laugh and laugh. She looks at the dried, blood-caked intravenous rig attached to her wrist, and she giggles and guffaws like it’s all a big practical joke.

  Then out of the corner of her eye she sees a water dispenser about ten feet away from her, nearly empty, a little left in the bottom. She crawls toward it. The inverted glass jug is shattered, but there’s at least a half gallon of liquid remaining in the neck. She manages to claw at the tap, rising up enough to get her mouth around the nozzle. A few ounces of tepid water dribble out, and she swallows greedily, then collapses.

  Lying there for a moment, spent, exhausted, staring at those ceiling tiles, nearly paralyzed, she hears the noises again coming from outside the room—choruses of watery, smacking noises, distant claps of gunfire, frantic voices shrieking. And even before she identifies the sources of these sounds, Lilly Caul intuits—despite her compromised condition—the dangers usually lurking behind such racket. This intuition sends waves of gooseflesh down her arms and legs. All of which seems doubly ironic and hilarious now that she realizes she’s been dreaming or hallucinating the whole Marietta experience, and she’s really not home, and the plague is real, and she’s … she’s … where is she?

  She manages to roll onto her side and lift her head enough to take a closer look at the room.

  At first, it appears to be someone’s office or private quarters within the hospital proper. The painted cinder-block walls have bulletin boards plastered with handwritten notes, chemical equations and cryptic diagrams. Here and there hang framed lithographs of French impressionist paintings. She sees the bent IV stand lying on the tiles next to her, the puddle of her own blood, the empty Visqueen IV bag as crumpled and shriveled as a desiccated prune. She sees hypodermics and curled leaves of thermo-readouts and sticky patches littering the floor. She sees an antique Victrola against one wall with its hand-crank dangling off one side and its lid open, the sound of an old 78-rpm record spinning at the end of its grooves like a small animal hyperventilating: Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap! The noise of it, as well as the absurdity of it, makes her giggle again, her laughter so bone-deep that she clutches herself, holding her tummy as though it’s about to burst.

  She looks down and sees evidence written across her flesh that she’s been in this room, probably drugged, probably comatose, for a long, long time. Countless needle marks riddle her arm above the intravenous port that still clings to her left wrist, the tube curling and spiraling across the floor. She’s clad in a shopworn smock, barefoot, naked underneath. Her skin is the color of wallpaper paste, bluish and livid in places, and stretched taut across the angles of her bones and joints. She is so emaciated and malnourished that she looks like one of those photos of prisoners of war liberated from their dank cells, the simple fact of daylight tormenting them, making them cower—all of which makes her let out another burst of inappropriate, hysterical, humorless laughter.

  Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!

  She makes another attempt to sit up and this time succeeds. Dizziness courses through her. She pulls the IV stick from her wrist, causing a sharp, stabbing pain in her arm. There is no blood left, however, the tube being completely drained. She giggles some more. Her heart races. The unholy choir of snarling and screams and gunshots outside her door rises and intensifies, the walker swarm getting closer. She turns her face away from the door and roars vomit.

  The contents of her stomach spumes out of her, bright yellow, nothing but bile, splashing across the tiles, soaking empty glucose bags. She retches and heaves noisily until nothing but delicate strings of drool are looping from her lower lip, which elicits more dope-sick laughter. Her voice hoarse from the strain and dehydration, she laughs and moans at the same time. It sounds like the howl of a hyena. She drops to her side, still shuddering.

  Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!—Fuhssshhh-whap!

  Her body goes still as she listens to the chaos approaching her door.

  The door.

  She looks up. Her head feels as though it weighs a hundred pounds. She can’t see the door. Her body vibrates and her vision swims and doubles, her eyes dry and dilated, her heart thumping arrhythmically.

  She’s never been this stoned. Even in her wildest party-modes with Megan—even that night she forgot how many tabs of X she had taken, and walked around the Cavern Club with her skirt around her ankles—she had not gotten this high. She feels feverish and yet shivers with sick-chills. She sees brilliant white artifacts of light in the corners of her eyes as she searches for the door.

  At last she sees it, a varnished slab of oak with a metal handle instead of a knob, shut tight and latched, about fifteen feet away. She starts crawling toward it.

  It takes her several agonizing minutes to reach the door—or maybe it takes hours, it’s hard to tell in her current condition—but when she finally gets there, she rises up on wobbling, uncertain legs, holding on to the door handle to steady herself. The door is locked, presumably from the outside. She lets out a sigh.

  “Fffffuck … ffuck … fuck.” The sound of her own voice is startling to her—a gravelly, toneless wheeze—the voice of someone who hasn’t spoken in ages. Her words are slurred, the effect of whatever she’s on causing her to sound inebriated. She turns and surveys the room one more time. She sees the clutter on a nearby desk, piles of spreadsheets and documents and computer printouts. She starts toward the desk. She trips over her own feet.

  She falls on her face and lets out another hyena bark of inappropriate giggling. She struggles back to her feet. She staggers. She concentrates on putting one foot in front of the other. She shambles over to the desk and starts rifling through the documents.

  Outside the door, a gunshot makes her jump as she discovers a note from a Dr. Raymond Nalls, PhD. It concerns something he calls “the setback of the recent reanimated tissue graft,” and it’s addressed to somebody named Colonel Wrightman, and it sends another surge of horrible recognition through Lilly like radio interference crackling in her brain, the recent memories of making her Faustian bargain with the old chemist coming back to her in one convulsive breath.

  The chaos outside the door closes in as Lilly rifles through more of the documents.

  She finds journal entries concerning EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS (L) and EXPERIMENTAL SUBJECTS (D), and she wonders what the letters mean for about half a second until she realizes with a shiver of disgust that the letters refer to “live” subjects versus “dead” subjects. But the thing that sinks a hook into her, and makes her go still with barely contained rage, is a series of notes that she happens across regarding the “children from the rural towns.” The hastily scrawled note is written in the messy hand of an old practitioner accustomed to writing prescriptions only pharmacists can read:

  It’s unfortunate that most will perish over the course of the trials but fretting about such trivial matters as losing a few children is akin to an artist worrying about killing a few flax plants in order to make his linseed oil. We are engaged in a higher calling than saving the few snotty-nosed tykes whom we’ve harvested from the outlands. We are embarked on the grandest mission known to man, namely saving the world.

  A burst of manic giggling spews out of Lilly as she tears the page from the notebook and tosses it across the room. She hears footsteps outside the door. She shoves the cluttered piles of documents off the desk, papers and printouts fluttering in all directions. She staggers toward the window, muttering angrily
, drunkenly, “Thinks he’s God, does he? Thinks he’s going to—”

  Behind her, the door bursts open, letting in a whirlwind of noise, flickering fluorescent light, and a formerly cloistered environment now turned inside out.

  * * *

  The old chemist lurches into the room, a pack of undead on his heels, the walkers swarming the narrow hallway behind him. The doctor’s lab coat is soaked in blood, stained from hem to collar, his face shiny with perspiration, his eyes aglow with terror. He clutches a leather portfolio as if his life depends on it. Behind him, a rotting, reanimated corpse in a Kevlar vest, bandolier, and pasty white face lunges at him, clawing at the air.

  The chemist slams the door on the walker’s arm. Lilly rushes to the old man’s side and helps press the door against the wriggling, clenching fingers of the walker. The flesh of the hand has molded, now looking like charred bark, and smells of the crypt. A signet ring with a red stone still adorns one of the hideous fingers. Lilly and the chemist both put their collective weight into the door, pressing it as hard as they can against the stubborn arm. Just for an instant Lilly peers through the narrow gap along the jamb and gets a fleeting glimpse of the walker’s face.

  The narrow, gaunt features of Sergeant Major Beau Bryce are nearly unrecognizable—bloodless and putrefied from early-stage decomposition—his cunning gray eyes now reduced to the dead white empty orbs of an amphibious creature risen from the swamp.

  Without warning the hand hooks itself on Lilly’s smock, and bunches the fabric, and starts tugging her forward. She pushes back harder and harder on the door. She screams and yells and barks garbled profanities that deteriorate into dope-sick giggles. The chemist puts his bony shoulder against the door and pushes as hard as he can, and finally, the collective pressure of the twosome bearing down on the door causes the tough cartilage and sinew of the dead arm to snap, dismembering the limb below the elbow.

  The door bangs shut and Lilly rears backward, chortling hysterically now as she realizes the hand is still clutching her smock, burrowing into the fabric with alarming pressure considering the fact that the arm is no longer attached to a body. She bats at it as though it were an insect or a rat latched onto her clothing. The chemist tries to help her, clawing at the thing.

  At last, Lilly tears the dead fingers from the fabric and tosses the appendage across the room. The thing bounces against the wall, fingers still splaying and clenching. It comes to rest on the tile floor, the thing going still, dying as a battery-operated toy might run out of power. Lilly stares at it for a moment, her laughter subsiding. She strokes the fabric of her smock with a sort of grim awe, the chills building within her, sending fresh waves of gooseflesh across the surface of her skin.

  The old man puts an arm around her, uttering softly, “Are you all right?”

  Lilly looks at him, says nothing, chuckles a little, and then slaps him. Hard. Backhands him across the face. The impact nearly knocks the feeble old chemist to the floor. He drops the portfolio and staggers for a moment, gasping, taken aback, rubbing his face. Then his eyes darken and he lunges at her.

  The two of them grapple awkwardly, locked in a violent embrace, backing Lilly toward the wall.

  She tries to go for his eyes. It’s unplanned, spontaneous, feral in its savagery. Her nails are long and untrimmed, but unfortunately she can’t cause much pain or damage before the old man gets his hands on her wrists. He shoves her against the wall. They slam into the plaster, the force of the impact knocking the wind out of Lilly. She gasps and spins away from the old man before he can hit her.

  He accidentally slams his fist into the wall where her face was only milliseconds earlier. The sound of his knuckles cracking is a faint, sick, crunching noise, like celery snapping, and he immediately hunches over in agony, holding his hand. He lets out a muddled cry corrupted by the shock and pain, his voice sounding like a rusty hinge squeaking. He starts to say something when Lilly’s knee rises up and slams into his chin.

  The chemist staggers backward for a moment before tripping over his own feet and falling on his bony ass. Lilly kicks him in the ribs. He gasps and cries out again and rolls across the room. Lilly lets out a psychotic laugh as she follows him, kicking him again and again, eliciting torturous cries and garbled entreaties. “S-stop!—Are you insane?!” The old man slams into the wall, and covers his head. It sounds like he’s crying but it comes out twisted like a warped recording of crying. “P-please—I’m begging you—please stop—you’re going to kill me—and—and—this is—not in your best interest!”

  Lilly pauses, breathing hard, the giggling subsiding one last time: nothing like a good beating to sober a person up. She stands over him, fists clenched, bare ass hanging out the back of her smock. Outside the door, the dead brush against the walls, the reek of rotting flesh so strong now that it has permeated the room. It smells like the bottom of a latrine in high summer. Lilly catches her breath. Her voice comes out flat and cold. “What possible good could it do me to keep your sorry ass around?”

  The old man marshals his energy before answering, struggling to sit up against the wall. He manages to do so, his deeply lined face pinched with torturous pain, his liver-colored lips bleeding, his wheezing breaths ragged with misery. He wipes the blood from his mouth before speaking. “I don’t blame you.”

  “How long have I been in here, drugged up, being drained like a cow?” She glares down at him with her hands on her hips. A loud thump against the outer door signals the swarm is building, intensifying. It makes the old man jump. The guttural chorus of moans and snarls echoes down the corridors. More walkers press in on the door.

  The old chemist looks up at her through sagging, bloodshot, ancient eyes. “It’s been … a month, perhaps.”

  A welding torch of rage blooms within her. “Give me a reason to let you keep breathing.”

  He looks at her, meeting her gaze, not looking away, not backing down. “Because I have the formulas, all the work we’ve done here.” He points a crooked, palsied finger at the leather-bound portfolio lying on the floor across the room. “Don’t let it be for nothing.”

  She doesn’t say anything. She studies the leather case on the floor. It’s a cheap nine-by-twelve-inch portfolio—maybe imitation leather—that has seen better days. The color of sun-bleached mud, shiny at the corners from wear, the seams splitting from being overstuffed with documents, the thing looks as though it’s been through an industrial washer and dryer a million times. She stares at it, thinking, until the sound of glass breaking out in the hall shakes her out of her spell. The crashing noises rise above the drone of dead vocal cords, something collapsing.

  The old man takes a deep breath. “Lilly, listen to me now. We were very close to a breakthrough before this facility fell. It happened so quickly, a few breaching the loading dock door and a few more on the inside getting bit. But the work must continue. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  Still no response from Lilly. She’s too busy thinking it over, listening to the rising tide of undead just outside their door.

  “Do you know who we have to thank for our progress in recent weeks, Lilly?” The old man trembles with emotion. “We have you to thank. Your blood, Lilly—type O negative—the universal donor. Whether you like it or not, you are now inextricably linked to our research. Don’t throw it all away. Join me, Lilly, and we’ll get out of here together. What do you say?”

  Still no answer.

  She’s thinking.

  SEVENTEEN

  They decide to barricade themselves in the room. They can hear the scuffling and the oily growling noises outside the room as they move a heavy shelving unit across the floor and up against the door. The horde has now flooded the fifth floor, the hospital completely given over to the dead. Lilly grabs a chair and wedges it against the shelves, lodging it underneath the door’s handle. She can see the minute vibrations in the joints of the door as more and more dead push up against it.

  “They can smell us.” Lilly utters t
his on a dry, husky whisper as she backs away from the trembling door. Her legs are still weak and wobbly but they’re improving. “We can’t stay in here for long.”

  “We have no choice.” Nalls backs away from the door, clutching his shopworn leather portfolio as if it were a life preserver.

  Lilly looks around the room. The tiles are cold on her bare feet and she’s still in that dizzy and dope-nauseous stage, but at least she can stand without keeling over. She needs to think. Her brain chugs, her bearings still slippery. She looks at the window, then looks at the old man. “What is this room? Where are we?”

  The chemist smiles wistfully. “A little bit of home, actually, a place where I can think and work in peace.” He looks at her. “I thought it would be safer for you to be in here. Some of the men, they…” He trails off and looks down at the floor. “I just thought it would be safer.”

  “What the fuck did you give me, kept me under so long and hallucinating like that?”

  He sighs and clutches his portfolio. “It’s a compound of my own design, used mostly to keep the troops docile and manageable at night.”

  “I don’t care who designed it, just tell me what it is and how I get it out of my system.”

  “It’s made from a plant, believe it or not. Turnera diffusa … better known as Damiana weed. Grows in profusion down here in the deeper South. I’m told it’s called Nightshade on the street.”

  “So how long does it last?”

  The old man purses his lips. “It has a long half-life, I will admit. But after an hour or so, most of its psychotropic properties will be diminished.”