The Walking Dead: Return to Woodbury

by Jay Bonansinga

  Finally pulling his legs free, Tommy rolls toward the other side of the thicket.

  He barely has time to get his legs under him, rise up, and launch into a dead run before the oncoming creatures swarm him and cut off his egress.

  He bursts through a wall of foliage and finds a narrow footpath. Racing down the serpentine trail, he searches for the rendezvous point.

  * * *

  Across the clearing, the dynamic shifts. Spooked by the near miss of the sniper’s bullet, Spencer-Lee almost instinctively retreats, whirling around, and hurling back into the shadows of the undergrowth. He lurches around the side of his crew cab, claws open the door, throws the weapon in, and climbs behind the wheel.

  His engine howls to life, a cloud of exhaust visible in the upper limbs of the woods.

  On the other side of the clearing, Lilly simultaneously gathers the children together. “Everybody, make a chain!” she hollers at them. “Older kids, take the younger kids’ hands!—Put the little ones between you!—Quick-quick-quick!—C’mon, stay low and follow me! C’mon! No talking—C’MON!!”

  Meanwhile, Ash has shifted the Escalade into Park and flipped the transmission back into 4WD. She quickly climbs out, stays low, and trundles around to the rear end. She kicks the jack out from under the car. Twigs and leaves and debris fly as the rear wheels slam down on the ground. She hurries back to the cab, climbs in, yanks it into Reverse, and floors it.

  The SUV screams backward, the gravitational force slamming Ash against the dashboard. Lilly and the kids are waiting near a grove of spindly maples.

  “Hurry!—Hurry!—Hurry, everybody! Pile in!” Lilly ushers the children, one after another, into the rear compartment of the massive SUV. As she does this, she gazes out across the clearing, searching the far copse of spindly trees. The crew cab has vanished. Lilly surveys the wooded area on either side of the road. Dryden is gone. Only the thin, dissipating cloud of carbon monoxide remains. Lilly climbs in behind the children, pulling her pistol from her belt. “Okay, let’s go! Let’s go! We gotta find Tommy before Dryden does!”

  Ash puts it in gear and slams the foot-feed down to the floor.

  * * *

  Spencer-Lee gets halfway down the access road when he catches a blurry glimpse of the shooter running behind the trees down a parallel trail.

  At first, through the damaged glass of the cab’s windshield, the figure appears to be merely a blur of filthy denim scurrying through the woods. But soon, Spencer-Lee identifies the sniper as a child—the poor, mixed-up teenage boy whom Ash had joined back at the outset of the chase—and now Spencer-Lee yanks the steering wheel. The crew cab careens wildly off-road.

  For a moment, Spencer-Lee considers calling out to the child. Maybe he can save this kid, teach him a more noble approach to survival. Unfortunately, the forest floor is so bumpy, and the foliage so thick—relentlessly scraping the sides of the vehicle, bullwhipping across the shattered windshield—that Spencer-Lee realizes in one frenzied instant that the kid will never hear him. There’s only one way Spencer-Lee is going to save this misguided, abused waif of a kid.

  Spencer-Lee makes a sharp turn to the left, the massive grill of the crew cab mowing down a cluster of aimless walkers coming up from the river, drawn to the gunshot and commotion. Bodily fluids and rancid matter spray across the steaming hood, washing up against the windshield and streaming across the cab’s bonnet. Spencer-Lee flips on the wipers and ignores the distraction of bloody teeth like kernels of rotten corn gathering in the gutters of the hood.

  The land west of the clearing is uneven, primordial, a verdant river valley with untrimmed dirt roads that snake around small kudzu-blanketed hills before plunging down short slopes into quagmires of tide pools, sulfurous, walker-ridden inlets, and Byzantine, oddly shaped coves. Some of the tributaries of the Chattahoochee have flooded to the point of forming tiny ponds and marshes that didn’t even exist a week ago, and now many of the pathways appear to vanish without warning, abruptly sinking into the mire. To add to the virtually impassable environment, the fierce afternoon sun has turned the area into a vaporous gumbo pot of low-lying mist and banks of methane so thick, the crew cab’s windshield is fogging up. Spencer-Lee reaches up and wipes the condensation from the inside of the glass.

  Without warning, a skinny male figure darts across the road directly in front of the crew cab.

  Spencer-Lee lets out a shocked gasp and slams his boot down on the brake pedal, the truck’s rear wheels immediately locking up, going into a skid on the soupy surface of the road. The boy dives out of the way. The cab spins out of control. Spencer-Lee wrestles the steering wheel. The landscape spins in a deep-green blur, as the boy—glimpsed for one more fleeting moment in Spencer-Lee’s peripheral vision—leaps over a parallel ledge.

  The truck comes to a sudden stop angled sideways across the road.

  Spencer-Lee sits behind the wheel for a moment, breathing hard, sweating, the heat making his mutilated, scorched face prickle. He jacks the driver’s-side door open and gets out. He rushes over to the edge of the hill and sees a short, sloping bank leading down to the water’s edge. The boy has vanished. He is nowhere in sight. There is hardly a ripple in the marsh, only a ghostly haze of methane adding to the illusion that the boy has performed some kind of diabolical magic trick.

  The sound of a large engine approaches from the east—the Escalade, most likely—which instantly gets Spencer-Lee’s hackles up.

  He takes one last glance down at the marshy cove, and then peers into the distant thicket of trees and creeping vines along the bank, the overgrowth stretching to the north and to the south as far as he can see. The flood level has receded somewhat in this part of the wetlands but the water is still so high that the trees are half-submerged, the great ancient cypresses with their gnarled roots like petrified tentacles probing out into the brackish stew.

  He gets an idea. Face twitching, tingling with phantom pain, Spencer-Lee glances over his shoulder at the dense pine forest blanketing the convolutions of the vast, ramshackle river valley—the run-down, derelict bait shops to the south, the pulverized docks, the useless power lines stitching through the high trees to the north, the flooded roads, the beached, demolished houseboats and sunken dinghies.

  The noise of the Escalade wavers in the middle distance, the echo of the motor bouncing off the trees. From this vantage point, it’s difficult to tell if it’s coming this way or leaving the area.

  Spencer-Lee goes back to the crew cab and climbs in, flipping open the glove box. He searches through the jumble of owner’s manuals, stale packs of cigarettes, old service invoices, and receipts. He finds an old folded state map. He takes it out and spreads it open on the passenger seat. He traces his thumbnail across the farmland to the east, across old Highway 85, past Highway 27, coming to rest on a tiny pinpoint of a dot.

  The dot sits in the middle of nowhere.

  SIXTEEN

  “I’m staying here until hell freezes over or Tommy shows up, whichever comes first.” Lilly gazes through the side window at the unforgiving shadows behind the trees, and then nods, more to herself than the others. Her spine twinges for a moment, her nervous system crosswired between her simmering pain and the insidious, debilitating doubt creeping back into her thoughts. Sometimes people disappear in this environment and they stay disappeared. Sometimes they come back and you wish they hadn’t. “He’ll be here. Trust me. He’ll find us. I know he will.”

  Sitting behind the wheel of the Escalade, she speaks to herself as much as to the others, scanning the impenetrable forest on either side of the rendezvous point. She feels scoured out, hollowed by all the violence and loss. The children hunker in the rear two rows behind her, so silent that their breathing is the only thing heard above the monotonous droning of insects and frogs in the humid air.

  “Looks like we got another one, heard us, sensed us, whatever … coming up on the right.” Ash grips the machete’s handle tightly, palm sweaty, gaze fixed on the creature. “Hide
your eyes, kids.”

  Nobody hides their eyes—even the youngest of the children—they just stare through the windows as another ragged male adult stumbles out of the adjacent woods and shambles toward the SUV. This one drags its left leg along like deadwood, the cue-ball-shaped top of the femur bone sticking out of a knotted mess of bloody tendons. Its upper body is clad in a gouged and torn work shirt—most likely the attire of a former dockworker—its pallid face mutilated and hanging in shreds. Only its milky white eyes and yellow teeth fix themselves on the passengers huddling inside the parked Escalade.

  When the creature reaches the front quarter panel, Ash lowers her window, clucks her tongue as though herding chickens, and waits almost nonchalantly for the thing to lunge at her. She thrusts her blade though the opening in a hard, quick, sideways arc, the weapon embedding itself in the thing’s scalp. The fluids bubble as the creature starts to collapse.

  Ash quickly extracts the machete and wipes the blood-coated blade on the thing’s arm before it tumbles to the ground.

  Lilly looks over her shoulder at the kids. Some of the younger ones just stare blankly with their thumbs in their mouths, appearing almost catatonic. Others take in the gruesome proceedings with a sort of grim ennui, their eyes glassy and far away, as though witnessing the completion of a household chore, the extermination of a roach or the swatting of a mosquito. The corruption of these innocent little people—or maybe desensitization is the better word for it—has taken years but it seems to have completely set in. Lilly can see it in their body language, their eyes.

  The process started in earnest over four years ago when the outbreak turned the world upside down for surviving children. It began with the nightmares. Lilly remembers trying to read comforting bedtime stories to the children of Woodbury during the Governor’s regime. Nothing helped. Some of the parents had tried to shield young eyes from the horrors of the walking dead, and worse, the brutality of fellow survivors. It hadn’t worked. The children—as they always do, eventually—see everything. They internalize it. They absorb it, and dream it, and mutate it into private, personal, nightmare angst that stunts their personalities and makes them sullen and withdrawn.

  Now, these eleven children have looked into the face of a human monster named Spencer-Lee Dryden, and the sight of those burning red eyes peering out from that devastated black monster-mask of a face has pushed most of these kids over the edge. But somehow, right now, strangely, glancing from face to face, Lilly sees a change in most of them—even the youngest ones—that maybe she should have seen coming all along. It’s a change that now comes over little Lucas Dupree in the way-back seats.

  “Lilly?” he says softly, aware of the need to stay quiet in order to avoid drawing more walkers. His huge blue eyes blaze with some unnamable emotion.

  “Yeah, Luke?”

  “Shouldn’t we go back?”

  “Back where?”

  “To kill the burned man.”

  Lilly takes a deep breath. “We will, Luke. As soon as Tommy gets here. We will. I promise. We’re gonna get it done once and for all.”

  “I’ll do it,” Chelsea Quinn says from the corner of the middle seat, her tiny chin jutting with courage. She has on a soiled pinafore dress over a filthy Pokemon T-shirt, and for the longest time Lilly had found that little corduroy coverall heartbreakingly adorable. But now, oddly, it looks to Lilly like body armor.

  Tyler Coogan gives Chelsea a withering glare. “How are you gonna kill some crazy dude? You couldn’t kill a fly with its wings torn off.”

  “Yes I could!” Chelsea’s chin juts even more prominently. “I would just stomp on the fly and squash it.”

  “So that’s what you have in mind for this Dryden dude? You’re gonna squash him?” At ten years old, Tyler Coogan has just recently entered the prepubescent sarcasm zone, in which every statement seems to come with air quotes. “Oh, that’s like totally brilliant, yeah, that’ll work.”

  “Tyler, leave her alone,” Jenny Coogan admonishes her brother, her nine-year-old eyes aglow with righteous indignation behind her horn-rimmed eyeglasses.

  Chelsea crosses her little arms ruefully. “What if I dropped a boulder on him? Huh? Huh? I’m pretty sure that would squash him real good!”

  “Keep it down! You’re gonna wake up more walkers.” Bethany, the voice of reason from the other side of the back row. “And nobody’s gonna squash the burned dude.”

  A feeble voice, faint and yet firm in its conviction, comes from Tiffany Slocum. “We’re gonna shoot him in the head … like a walker … right?”

  Her twin sister nods fervently. “Yep. Tommy’s got more bullets. He’s gonna do it.”

  Bobby Quinn chimes in. “And if that doesn’t work, I’m gonna do it.”

  Cindy Nesbit says, “You don’t even have a gun, Bobby. How are you gonna shoot him?”

  “I’m gonna stab him in the chest with my knife. Then I’m gonna twist it back and forth so it’ll tear up all his heart and lungs and stuff.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Trudy Quinn comments, contemplating her big brother’s plan. “Then he won’t be able to kill anybody else like he did our dad.”

  Lilly has been listening to this strange discourse, fascinated, but now she glances at Ash, who sits in the passenger seat, head down, a tear like a single pearl dangling off her nose. The tear drops in Ash’s lap. Lilly feels a pang of empathy for her friend, for the loss of Ash’s partner and mate and father of her children. But something deeper within Lilly overrides this twinge of sympathy. Lilly has lost many friends of her own over the last couple of years, including her father and every man she ever loved. The pain is a living thing inside her, metastasizing, spreading, malignant. But now the pain has transformed into something new—an existential savagery not unlike the cold expressions passing among the children. Lilly will happily assist little Bobby Quinn in the twisting of that fucking knife.

  Behind Lilly, pressed against the side window, Trudy Quinn begs to differ. “You have to stab him in the head, though, if you don’t want him to kill anybody else … right? If you don’t stab him in the head, he’ll turn. Aren’t you going to stab him in the head, Bobby?”

  Bobby shrugs. “I hope he does turn.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then I can cut his head off and hang it in a tree forever and ever, and he’ll have to spend the rest of ever and ever staring down at the world, like a … like a … bobble head … and he won’t have any arms or legs, or any way to hurt anybody else ever again, but he’ll be in hell because he can never die.”

  Silence grips the car for a moment. Lilly reaches out and puts a gentle hand on Ash’s shoulder. No words are spoken between the two women. But the glance that’s exchanged is loaded with portents.

  Ash looks down into her lap. “This is all my fault.”

  “That’s ridiculous … what are you talking about?” Lilly strokes her shoulder. “This is all the fault of one homicidal maniac.”

  “I’m the one, got caught … I’m the one, trashed his compound, killed his men, got Quinn killed.” She thinks about it for a moment. The kids are riveted to her words. “I’m the one turned him into monster.”

  “Ash, listen to me. He already was a monster. And by the way … Quinn saved our lives. He died a hero. Quinn was an amazing man. He lived a great life—a full life. He died well, Ash. He did. He died well.”

  For a moment, Lilly lets the words hang there in the silent vehicle. She glances over her shoulder and sees the faces of children ruminating on her words, her message of heroism, love, and courage.

  “Lilly?” Mercy Slocum says at last, her pear-shaped little face all furrowed with thought.

  “Yeah, sweetie?”

  “What’s ‘dying well’ mean?”

  Lilly gives her sad smile and says, “That’s an excellent question. Put it this way…”

  Pausing for a second, Lilly gazes out the shattered side widow at the densely packed rows of sugar maples growing riotous against the talle
r trees, the massive trunks of ancient live oaks like scabrous behemoths reaching their contorted bones to the sky in immortal tableau, all of it cloaked in thick cables of kudzu and creeping vines. The dirt macadam on which they sit and wait for a young man who may never arrive—a pair of intersecting paths shrouded by foliage, veiled by undergrowth—looks as though it tunnels through the shadows of the underworld. A dilapidated, weathered sign along the shoulder says LOWER GLASS BRIDGE ROAD 1 MI. The rendezvous point, chosen for its hidden quality, and hastily mapped out on pages torn from an old yellowed Rand McNally atlas, now worries Lilly. Maybe the place is so hidden, even Tommy Dupree can’t find it. Lilly’s father used to say, “Never tempt fate, darlin’.” But maybe that’s exactly what Lilly has done by talking about dying well. Tommy Dupree might be doing just that at this very moment somewhere out in the wilderness.

  A shiver of dread travels down Lilly’s spine, and she looks at Mercy Slocum and finishes her thought. “I guess it means being a hero.”

  “Like Superman?”

  “Yeah … but it’s even better than that. You die well, you’re better than Superman.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Superman has supernatural powers. Your daddy was human, and he died like Superman. A person should be proud of that.”

  Mercy silently chews on this concept for a moment. “But my daddy can’t be proud of nothin’ no more ’cause he got hisself dead.”

  Lilly has no answer.

  There is no answer.

  * * *

  An hour passes. The kids get restless, fidgeting in the rear rows, occasionally shoving each other or bickering, the seams in their nervous systems beginning to show. The Escalade’s interior turns into an oven—the open windows not helping much, the late-afternoon heat pressing down on them—and Lilly starts running the engine and AC intermittently in order to conserve fuel. They all share the meager supply of drinking water. The car smells of BO and stress and mold. Little Teddy Nesbit falls asleep on his sister’s shoulder, the girl squirming and pushing him away. Lilly and Ash keep gently chastising the children to keep quiet and sit still but it doesn’t help much.