The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  “We can’t go there right now. Not yet. We need to find fuel somewhere, and there’s something I need to do first before we head back home.”

  Ash speaks up. “What’s going on?” Her voice is hoarse and spent. “What are you talking about? What are you up to, Lilly?”

  “Give me a second,” she says, digging her Ruger pistol out of the map case, pulling back the slide, checking the breach. “I promise I’ll explain everything.” She opens the door, pauses, and looks back at the kids. “Everybody cover your ears, there’s gonna be a bang.”

  She steps outside the car, aims into the night sky, and squeezes off a single round. The muzzle barks and sends a flicker of silver light up into the clouds, the report echoing over the Chattahoochee.

  She gets back into the car, slams the door. She slams it loudly.

  Tommy gives her a look. “You want to explain what the hell is going on?”

  Ash pipes up: “Lilly, I don’t know if you’re keeping score but we left one man alive back there. The walkers are not the only ones gonna be drawn to the sound of that gunshot.”

  “I know, I know, and that’s exactly why—”

  “No, I don’t think you do know! I don’t think you have the first inkling what we’re dealing with here. This man is bug-fuck crazy.”

  Little Teddy Nesbit slams his tiny hands over his ears and cries out, “Stop cursing!”

  Next to him, Tiffany Slocum starts to whimper softly, tears welling up in her enormous blue eyes. This starts an epidemic of sniffling and mewling across two rows of seats. Mercy Slocum starts to sob, and thumbs go into the mouths of many of them.

  “Okay. Okay. Everybody calm down.” Lilly twists around and gazes at all the owlish faces in the green glow of the dashboard light, the looks of reticence, trauma, bone-deep weariness, and debilitating shock. She gently puts a hand on little Teddy’s knee. “I promise we’ll refrain from cursing.” She looks at the others. “I’m going to get you all back to Woodbury safe and in one piece. You have my word on that. All in good time.” She looks at Ash. “The thing is, I wanted this silly man to hear that noisy old gunshot.”

  Ash stares at her. “And why, Auntie Lilly, would you do something as … silly as that?”

  “Because I want to … draw him into a little game, I guess you could say.”

  Tommy gapes at her. “What are you talking about?”

  After a long pause, racking her brain for another way to say it, she finally replies, “We’re gonna kill him.”

  PART 3

  The Sky Is Bleeding

  For you have girded me with strength for battle.

  —Psalms 18:39

  TWELVE

  The morning dawns brilliant and clear over the untamed borderlands southwest of Atlanta. The sunlight drives away the wee-hour mists that cling to the back roads and piney woods, cleansing the floodplains with the impact of a cauterizing flame.

  It has been mere days since the advent of the epochal floods. In the absence of a National Weather Service, some local survivors have named the tropical storm of the previous week Scarlett, as in Scarlett O’Hara, the archetypal petulant, spoiled, volatile southern belle. But now, with the convivial, late-summer weather, many of the swampy portions of the farmlands have already started to recede and many of the flooded patches of the roadways have lessened, or in some cases, have completely dried up. The only area that remains in a state of virtual impassability is the long, 150-mile strip of lowlands paralleling the serpentine twists and turns of the swollen Chattahoochee.

  The wide, muddy, prehistoric river—which forms a natural border between Georgia and Alabama—has become the little sister to the Mississippi, a primordial main cable running like a circuit through the American South. Starting its journey way up in Blue Ridge Mountains, the Chattahoochee tumbles southward all the way down into the festering coastal plains south of Tallahassee, where it ultimately empties into the Gulf. Along the way, it widens intermittently into a string of narrow lakes, zigzagging somewhat maniacally on its way to the sea.

  Historians believe that early Native Americans lived along these verdant, green deltas and berms that line the river’s hundred-mile midsection as early at 2000 BC. Archeological evidence reveals that early societies believed the river had mystical powers—and not all of them benign. Nineteenth-century riverboat captains wrote in their journals of ghostly phenomena late at night in the shallows, apparitions of ancient shamans on makeshift rafts performing rituals and ceremonies. In 1828, the captain of the riverboat Julia Swain reported seeing an entire one-mile stretch of the river above Franklin turn deep crimson red, filling with the blood of past generations who have met violent ends along the ribbon of wormy-gray water. The twentieth century generated its share of folklore as well, from alleged body dump sites up and down the river to celebrated sunken treasures from the Civil War era being dredged up on a regular basis.

  That morning, along the fetid tidal swamps and flooded deltas of the Chattahoochee’s north branch, that same intense sun shines down on a modified VW Beetle being pulled by a draft horse through the standing water of a two-lane. The crumbling road weaves its way southward along the flooded landscape, most of its pavement dry enough now to be passable. At the moment, the two occupants of the makeshift horse-cart are idly chatting—despite their language barrier—about the discoveries they’ve made over the last twenty-four hours. They have seen disturbing things—the remains of thousands of bodies, most of them walkers, littering the farmlands, as well as human casualties, partially devoured horses, and dozens of wrecked vehicles—as though a battle in a larger war had occurred in these parts very recently.

  Now these two friends move south at a slow but steady pace, their horse exhausted, foaming at the bit, drenched in sweat and steaming from five straight days of travel.

  At length, the man behind the reins breaks the momentary silence, speaking in a measured tone as he gazes out at the flooded banks of the river. “Guess we’ll never know for sure what happened back there.”

  “You saw something, though, did you not?” the younger man says in a heavy accent, his complexion as dark and rough as tree bark from days upon days spent in exile. He is not an unattractive man—his dark eyes sparkle with intelligence, his boyish face creased with world-weary sadness—but even now, after days of camaraderie with the older man, compulsively crisscrossing the lower half of the state, he still gives off an air of the stranger, an alien in an alien land. “I saw it in your face.”

  The other man shrugs. “I don’t know, it could be nothing, or it could be … something.”

  “What was it?”

  The man at the reins doesn’t answer straight away, instead just clucks his tongue pensively at the horse, worried about the animal’s fitness. A man well into his sixties, David Stern wears a ratty silk roadie jacket, a Braves cap, and an iron-gray goatee. The burns along the side of his face, which interlace a series of severe scars, have faded, and he now gives off his default appearance, an aging college football coach. All of which masks his desperate loneliness and need to find his sweet Barbara. “Okay,” he finally says. “For the longest time, I was convinced that Babs and the others had been taken to Atlanta. We heard the kidnappers talking about heading north, getting back to the city—I just figured they had a place up there. But after kicking around that hellish town for months, barely getting out with my skin intact, I came to believe I was wrong. They must have ended up somewhere else.”

  “But you don’t feel that way anymore? You saw something back there that changed your mind?”

  The dark-skinned young man looks tantalized by the possible clue left among the gruesome aftermath of the chase. Perpetually curious, Rafael Rodrigo Machado is a bundle of contradictions. At one time, a notorious drug runner playing two cartels against the middle, a hard-ass who took a prison sentence over snitching, Rafael also has a childlike way about him. In just five short days, he has practically become a surrogate son to David Stern. And Rafael is convinced the feelin
g is reciprocated by the older man.

  “I saw a box,” David Stern says at last. “In some of the wreckage.”

  “A box?”

  The older man glances at the younger man. “You ever heard of Ikea?”

  “What?”

  “I-kee-uh. Furniture store. Scandinavian, I guess.” He makes a gesture with his hands. “Big. Big place. All kinds of stuff. Cheap.” He gestures again. “Affordable … for students, young couples. ¿Comprende?”

  Rafael chuckles. “Yeah, I comprende. We have one in São Paulo. Fantastic for bookshelves.”

  David Stern laughs. “Right … right … and their meatballs are not too shabby either.”

  “You think this has something to do with your wife?”

  David shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s like an onion, you start peeling it … I don’t know. There’s this big Ikea in the city. I can’t remember if I passed it. The truth is, it just sounds like something Babs would appreciate. Something Lilly Caul would do.”

  “You mean go to an Ikea?”

  “Not just go to it.” David looks at him. “Think about it. They must have all kinds of goodies there, could sustain a group for years. Did you notice that stuff scattered across that field? Lamps, small generators … God knows what else. That kinda stuff could all be from Ikea.”

  “But how do you know it was your wife? How do you know it was them?”

  A weary sigh escapes David Stern as he gazes thoughtfully across the fecund tide pools and mossy, contorted landmasses poking out of the floodwaters to the west as the horse splashes through six inches of standing water. The river crested a few days ago, sweeping up untold numbers of dead into the roiling currents and carrying them into deeper waters, where some flailed and sank in clusters, populating the river’s depths like schools of bottom-feeding fish, while others collected in the shallows, water bound and stuck in the mire, snarling impotently at the dispassionate sky above them. Now curtains of gnats and water bugs swirl in glistening clouds above the waterlogged necropolis. For some reason, the sight of the hellish, walker-ridden waterway weighs on David Stern as they pass. It twists in his guts, and taunts him. “I don’t know anything anymore,” he grumbles. “Maybe the only thing I know for sure is that I’m gonna keep looking. She’s out there somewhere.”

  In the sudden silence, Rafael nods, saying nothing, gazing out at the horizon to the south.

  They have yet to explore this part of the state. They’ve been as far as Augusta to the east, and as far as the Florida border to the south, finding plenty of devastation, aimless swarms of the dead, and the ruins of once vibrant little towns. It appears as though the survivor settlements have dwindled, either through attrition or death, or perhaps folks being driven underground (in many cases literally underground). David’s search parameters—in his typical anal-retentive style—have followed a very logical, grid-like pattern. They have swept three corners of the state without finding a trace of Barbara and the others, and now they are embarking on the last leg.

  Now they ride south, mostly in silence, tracing the convolutions of the flooded river for nearly an hour. For most of that time, Rafael looks as though he’s working something out in his mind, occasionally glancing over at David, then gazing out at the wasted landscape to the west. Rafael Machado has no girlfriend, his parents long ago deceased, no friends, no surviving family. At last, he says, “Tell me another one.”

  David Stern smiles to himself. “I never thought I’d run out of them.” He purses his lips, snapping the reins and urging the horse through a washed-out patch of road. “Okay. Here’s another one for ya.” He takes a deep breath, the memory kindling in the back of his mind, warm and somehow reassuring. “We were just kids. This was way back in the prehistoric era when phones had dials and I had all my hair. We were both students at Vanderbilt, and we were going out occasionally. Nothing serious, mind you. She had another boyfriend, I think. Can’t remember his name.” He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I wasn’t sure about her. The jury was still out, to be honest.”

  “The jury was what?” Rafael asks, not really comprehending.

  David chuckles. “Sorry, another American expression. Like a jury, I had not yet reached a verdict about Barbara. She was cute. No doubt about it. But I wasn’t sure she dug me as much as I dug her. You know what I mean?”

  Rafael nods. “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Anyway. One night we go out to a dive bar—a tavern in Nashville—and we get hammered. I mean plastered. We were so drunk we could barely walk outta there. So as we’re leaving, I have to pee something awful. She says to me, ‘Just go around back in the alley.’ I thought it was a good idea, so I did. And I’m standing there in that dark alley, minding my own business, pissing on the wall, when this blue light starts flashing all around me. It was a cop car. And these two patrolmen corner me with their flashlight in my face, and they tell me they have to take me in for public indecency or whatever. I’m stunned. Dizzy. Confused. And I start to go with them when this voice calls out.”

  Rafael is smiling. “It is Barbara?”

  “Bingo.” David shakes his head at the memory. “Here she comes, coming down the alley toward us, drunk as a skunk, but keeping it together. And believe me when I tell you, she was a looker back then. Drop-dead gorgeous. In her peasant dress, her curves, her long blond curls and blue eyes—like a Michelangelo painting. And she says to the cops, ‘Excuse me, but this is my date, and I have no way to get home without him, and by the way, this is utterly beneath you as law enforcement officers.’”

  Rafael grins. “Very nice.”

  “Yeah, well … I cringed at first, thinking they’re going to throw the book at me now. But then I see the two cops look at each other, and it was kind of magic. She got to them. Instantly. She won them over. They were shaking their heads, and had these little grins, as she goes on and says, ‘And by the way, if I’m not mistaken, you two gentlemen are of the male persuasion, and you have probably urinated yourselves in the great out of doors more times than Carter has pills. If I’m wrong, please throw the book at this man. But if you have any conscience whatsoever, you’ll let him off with a warning this time so that he can escort me back to my sorority house safely, which, as you know, is his duty as a gentleman regardless of his urination habits.”

  Laughing out loud, Rafael nods and says, “This is quite a woman, yes?”

  David grins. “Yes indeed, this is quite a woman. In fact, I have to admit, on that night, at that moment, I realized I had fallen big-time for this girl. She was everything I had ever dreamed of. She was … my girl. From that point on.”

  Rafael nods and thinks about it, and they ride another few moments in silence.

  At last, David Stern says softly, “She’s still drop-dead gorgeous … you’ll see.”

  * * *

  By late afternoon, they’ve crossed nearly thirty miles of waterlogged roads and dirt paths winding along the flooded Chattahoochee River Valley. They have passed several little river towns along the way—West Point, Fort Valley, Hemdale—which have succumbed to the flooding, their little antebellum cottages and gazebos under twenty feet of water, their locks and dams either submerged or destroyed by the storms. David remembers this part of the river having a dam every mile or so, behind which, in a happier time, families enjoyed boating and fishing.

  Now the day has turned as hot as a blast furnace, not a cloud in the pallid sky, the sun an angry god hurling righteous misery on the simmering tidal swamps, the straggling hordes of dead, and the derelict, storm-tossed fishing villages. Visibility is practically unlimited, which makes David Stern all the more nervous. As he pushes the poor draft horse long past its reserves of energy—the animal wheezing and snorting now with each twist in the two-lane—his shifting gaze alternates between the muddy river to his right, and the vast ramshackle farms and shanties of the rural lowlands to his left.

  “David!” The sound of Rafael’s taut cry gets the older man’s attention. “Look! Out on the water—see
it? Is that a—?”

  David Stern yanks the reins and pulls the sweaty workhorse to a stop. “Son of a bitch, you’re right!” The older man twists around and fishes through a rucksack on the backseat, looking for a small pair of field glasses. He finds them, digs them out, and looks through the narrow eyecups. “I’ll be a monkey’s asshole.…”

  In the narrow oval field of view, David can just make out a person floating slowly southward on a large scrap of wood, lying on their stomach, head down, motionless, drifting on the lazy currents. At this point in the river, the water line has widened out to almost a thousand feet from shore to shore, the waterborne walkers thinning out as well (David’s not certain but this may be one of the many inner lakes that connect the river like a series of baubles on a vast necklace). David can see that the raft is fringed with sticks and trash and weeds that have apparently adhered to it over the course of God knows how long. The person on the raft does not appear to be moving. From this distance, David can’t tell if they are simply unconscious or dead.

  Rafael speaks up. “Think they’re still alive?”

  “Can’t tell. But if they’re dead, they probably would have come back at some point.” David fiddles with the focus dial. His stomach clenches with excitement. “Jesus Christ, it can’t be … it can’t be.”

  “What’s wrong? Can’t be what? Do you recognize the person, David?”

  David can see that it’s an adult female sprawled on that ramshackle raft, which looks as though it’s been through hell and back. The woman is black, portly, with a bandanna wrapped around her head. Her brown skin is ashen and sunburned, and her big feet—still clad in their trademark clodhopper boots—hang off the end of the raft, the toes partially dragging in the water. David murmurs softly, nervously, with his eyes still pressed to the tiny cups, “Goddamn right I recognize the person!”

  David whips the reins. The horse lurches into a gallop. Both men sink into the Bug’s seats as the animal pulls the contraption into a headlong charge around a bend in the road. The wheels cobble over roadkill and splash through the muck, the VW rattling so severely it sounds as though it’s falling apart. David yells over the noise. “See if you can find that nylon rope—the one we use to hitch the horse to trees at night! I think it’s in that green rucksack! Quick, Rafael, quick as you can!”