“Lilly-girl?” Bob’s voice. Faint. Sounding as though it’s coming from a great distance. “You okay?”
For one last fleeting instant, staring at the dead face of that farmhand, Lilly thinks of Austin Ballard, the androgynous, long-lashed, rock-star-handsome young man whom she saw sacrificed on a battlefield in order to save Lilly and half the people in Woodbury. Was Austin Ballard the only man Lilly had ever truly loved?
“Lilly?” Bob’s voice rises slightly behind her, tinged with worry. “You all right?”
Lilly lets out a pained breath. “I’m good … I’m fine.” Suddenly, without warning, she lifts herself to her feet. She gives Bob a nod and then picks up her handgun, shoving it back into her holster. She licks her lips and looks around the group. “Everybody okay? Kids?”
The other two children slowly nod, looking at Lilly as though she has just lassoed the moon. Calvin sheathes his knife and kneels and strokes his daughter’s hair. “She okay?” he asks his wife.
Meredith gives him a terse nod, doesn’t say anything. The woman’s eyes look glassy.
Calvin lets out a sigh and stands. He comes over to Lilly. She is busy helping Bob drag the corpse under an overhang for later retrieval. She stands up, wiping her hands on her jeans and turning to face the newcomer. “I’m sorry you folks had to see that,” she says to him. “How’s the girl?”
“She’ll be okay, she’s a strong one,” Calvin says. He holds Lilly’s gaze. “How about you?”
“Me?” Lilly sighs. “I’m fine.” She lets out another pained breath. “Just tired of it.”
“I hear ya.” He cocks his head a bit. “You’re pretty handy with that firearm.”
Lilly shrugs. “I don’t know about that.” Then she looks around the center of town. “Gotta keep our eyes open. Place saw a lot of upheaval over the last few weeks. Lost an entire section of the wall. Still a few stragglers. But we’re getting it back under control.”
Calvin manages a weary smile. “I believe you.”
Lilly notices something dangling on a chain around the man’s neck—a large silver cross. “So what do you think?” she asks.
“About what?”
“Staying on. Making a home here for your family. What do you think?”
Calvin Dupree takes a deep breath and turns to gaze at his wife and daughter. “I won’t lie … it’s not a bad idea.” He licks his lips pensively. “Been on the move for a long time, been putting the kids through the mill.”
Lilly looks at him. “This is a place they can be safe, happy, lead a normal life … more or less.”
“I ain’t saying no.” Calvin looks at her. “All I’m asking is … you give us time to think about it, pray on it.”
Lilly nods. “Of course.” For a brief instant, she thinks about the phrase “pray on it” and wonders what it would be like to have a Holy Roller in their midst. A couple of the Governor’s men used to pay lip service to having God on their side, and what would Jesus do, and all that 700 Club nonsense. Lilly has never had much time for religion. Sure, she’s prayed silently on a few occasions since the plague broke out, but in her mind that doesn’t count. What’s that saying? “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” She looks into Calvin’s gray-green eyes. “You take all the time you need.” She smiles. “Look around, get to know the place—”
“That won’t be necessary,” a voice interrupts, and all heads turn to the mousy woman kneeling by her trembling child. Meredith Dupree strokes the girl’s hair and doesn’t make eye contact as she speaks. “We appreciate your hospitality, but we’ll be on our way this afternoon.”
Calvin looks at the ground. “Now, honey, we haven’t even discussed what we’re going to—”
“There’s nothing to discuss.” The woman looks up, her eyes glittering with emotion. Her chapped lips tremble, her pale flesh blushing. She looks like a delicate porcelain doll with an unseen crack down its middle. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Honey—”
“There’s nothing more to talk about.”
The silence that ensues makes the awkward moment turn almost surreal, as the wind buffets the tops of the trees, whistling through the gantries and trestles of the adjacent stadium, and the dead farmhand festers silently on the ground only a few feet away. Everybody in close proximity of Meredith, including Bob and Lilly, looks down with mute embarrassment. And the silence stretches until Lilly mumbles something like, “Well, if you change your mind, you can always stay on.” Nobody says anything. Lilly manages a cockeyed smile. “In other words, the offer stands.”
For a brief instant Lilly and Calvin share a furtive glance, and a tremendous amount of information is exchanged between them—some of it intentional, some of it unintentional—without a single word spoken. Lilly remains silent out of respect, aware that this issue between these two newcomers is far from resolved. Calvin glances over at his jittery wife as she tends to the child.
Meredith Dupree looks like a phantom, her anguished face so ashen and drawn and haunted she looks as though she’s gradually disappearing.
Nobody realizes it then, but this frumpy, diminutive hausfrau—completely unremarkable in almost every conceivable way—will prove to be the second and far more profound issue with which Lilly and the people of Woodbury will sooner or later have to deal.
TWO
By midday, the mercury rises into the seventies, and the high, harsh sun blanches the color out of the West Central Georgia farmland. The tobacco and bean fields south of Atlanta have all gone to seed or have grown into jungles of switchgrass and cattails, the fossilized remains of farm machinery sunken into the foliage, rusted out and stripped, as desiccated as the skeletons of dinosaurs. Which is why Speed Wilkins and Matthew Hennesey do not notice the secret crop circle east of Woodbury until well into the afternoon.
The two young men—sent out that morning by Bob, ostensibly to find fuel from wrecked cars or abandoned gas stations—had started their journey in Bob’s pickup truck but now have gone off-road after getting stuck in the mud and lighting out on foot.
They cross nearly three miles of wagon-rutted access roads before pausing on a ridge overlooking a vast meadow riotous with wild sedges, deadfalls, and a profusion of prairie grass. Matthew is the first to see the deeper circle of green in the far distance, nestled amid the leathery jungle of untended tobacco plants.
“Hold the phone,” he mutters, shooting a hand up and becoming very still on the edge of the precipice. He gazes out at the distant tobacco fields wavering in the heat rays, shielding his deep-set eyes, squinting against the glare of the sun. A lanky laborer from Valdosta, with an anchor tattoo on his sinewy forearm, Matthew wears the garb of a bricklayer—sweat-stained wife-beater T-shirt, gray work pants, clodhopper boots pasty with mortar dust. “You got them binocs handy?”
“Here ya go.” Speed digs in his rucksack, pulls out the binoculars, and hands them over. “What is it? Whaddaya lookin’ at?”
“Not sure,” Matthew murmurs, fiddling at the focus knob, scanning the distance.
Speed waits, scratching his muscular arm, the row of mosquito bites a new development, his REM T-shirt sweat-plastered to his broad chest. The stocky twenty-year-old has withered slightly from his playing weight of two hundred and ten pounds—most likely due to a plague diet of foraged canned goods and scrawny rabbit stew—but his neck still has that steel-belted thickness of a lifelong defensive end.
“Whoa.” Matthew stares through the lenses. “What the fuck is—?”
“What is it?”
Matthew keeps the binoculars pressed to his eyes, licking his lip judiciously. “If I’m not mistaken, we just hit the jackpot.”
“Fuel?”
“Not exactly.” He hands the binoculars back, then grins at his comrade. “I’ve heard it called many things but never ‘fuel.’”
They make their way down the gravel slope, across a dry creek bed, and into a sea of tobacco. The odor of manure and humus engulfs them, as thick and redolent as the ins
ide of a greenhouse. The air is so humid it lies heavy on their skin and in their nostrils. The crops are mostly in their flowering stage, rising up at least five feet tall among the tufts of wild grass, so each man has to crane his neck and walk on the balls of his feet in order to navigate. They pull their pistols and thumb the safeties off—just in case—although Matthew saw little or no movement other than waves of khaki green blowing in the breeze.
The secret crop lies about two hundred yards beyond a gnarled grove of live oaks sticking out of the tobacco like palsied sentries. Through the jungle of stalks, Matthew can see the security fence surrounding the contraband plants. He lets out a little giddy giggle and says, “You believe this? I don’t fucking believe this…”
“Is that what I think it is?” Speed marvels as they approach the fence.
They emerge into the clearing and stand there gaping at the long, lush tines of leaves spiraling up rows of mossy support timbers and rusty chicken wire. A narrow path has been dug out beyond the east corner of the clearing, now overgrown with weeds, no wider than a laundry chute—probably once the province of minibikes or off-road ATVs. “Fuck me,” Matthew comments reverently.
“Holy shit, we are going to have a hot time in the old town tonight.” Speed paces along the row of plants, looking them up and down. “There’s enough here to keep us going until the next fucking ice age.”
“Amazing stuff, too,” Matthew says, pausing to smell a leaf. He rubs a piece between his thumb and forefinger and breathes in the musky scent of citrusy-sage. “Look at that hairy fucking bud up there.”
“Fucking a, Bubba—we just won the lottery.”
“Got that right.” Matthew pats his pockets, shrugs off his pack. His heart races with anticipation. “Help me rig something we can use as a pipe.”
* * *
Calvin Dupree holds the tiny sterling silver crucifix with the coiled chain nestled in his palm as he paces the cluttered storage room in the rear of the Woodbury courthouse. He walks with a slight limp, and he’s so gaunt he looks like a scarecrow in his baggy chinos. He feels light-headed with nerves. Through the grimy glass of a single window he can see his three children playing in a little community play lot, taking turns pushing each other on a rusty swing set. “I’m just saying”—he rubs his mouth and lets out a sigh—“we gotta think of the kids, what’s best for them.”
“I am thinking of the kids, Cal,” Meredith Dupree counters from across the room in a voice taut with nervous tension. She sits on a folding chair, sipping bottled water and staring at the floor.
They each had a can of Ensure the night before in Bob’s infirmary to treat their malnutrition, and this morning they had a full breakfast with cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, and crackers. The food has helped them physically, but they’re still grappling with the trauma of near starvation on the road. Lilly gave them the private room a few minutes ago, as well as all the additional food, water, and time they might need to get their bearings. “Best thing for us,” Meredith mutters into her lap, “is the best thing for them.”
“How do you figure that?”
She looks up at him, her eyes red rimmed and wet, her lips so chapped they look to be on the verge of bleeding. “You know when you fly, how they show you that safety film?”
“Yeah, and…?”
“In the unlikely event the cabin loses air pressure, you should put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help your kids?”
“I don’t understand. What is it you’re afraid of if we stay here?”
She shoots him a hard look. “C’mon, Cal … you know very well what happens if they find out about my … my condition. Remember the KOA camp?”
“Those people were paranoid and ignorant.” He walks over to her, kneels by her chair, puts a tender hand on her knee. “God brought us here, Mer.”
“Calvin—”
“Seriously. Listen. This place is a gift. God has brought us here and He wants us to stay. Maybe that older man—Bob, I think his name is—maybe he’s got medication you can use. This is not the Middle Ages.”
Meredith looks at him. “Yes, it is, Cal … it is the Middle Ages.”
“Honey, please.”
“They drilled holes in the heads of the mentally ill back then—it’s worse than that now.”
“These people aren’t gonna persecute you. They’re just like us, they’re just as scared. All they want is to protect what they got, make a safe place to live.”
Meredith shivers. “Exactly, Cal … and that’s why they’re gonna do exactly what I would do if I was them and I learned somebody in their midst was a mental defect.”
“Now stop it! Stop talking that way. You ain’t no defect. The Good Lord has helped us get this far, and He’s gonna see us through—”
“Calvin, please.”
“Pray with me, Mer.” He takes her hand, cups it in his weathered fingers, bows his head. His voice softens. “Dear Lord, we ask for your guidance in this difficult time. Lord, we trust in you … you are our rock and protection. Lead us and guide us.”
Meredith looks down, her brow furrowed with pain, her eyes welling up again.
Her lips are moving, but Calvin is not sure whether she’s mouthing a prayer or mumbling something far more cryptic and personal.
* * *
Speed Wilkins sits up with a start, stirred awake by the overwhelming stench of walkers. He rubs his bloodshot eyes and tries to get his bearings—racking his brain to remember how he had managed to drift off out in the open, without a lookout, alone in such a deserted rural area. The sun is hotter than a blast furnace. He’s been asleep for hours. He is soaked in sweat. A gnat hums around his ear. He shivers and bats it away.
He looks around the immediate vicinity and sees that he apparently drifted off on the edge of the overgrown tobacco field. His joints ache. Especially his knees, still weak and brittle from old football injuries. He never was a great athlete. His first year of playing Division III football for the Piedmont College Lions in Athens had been a bust, but he had high hopes for his sophomore year—and then the Turn happened, and it all went up in smoke.
Smoke!
All at once it comes back to him—what he was doing here earlier when he nodded off in the wild grass—and he feels the simultaneous yet contrary waves of shame, embarrassment, and hilarity that often grip him when coming down off a major high. He remembers discovering the clandestine marijuana field just to the north, a treasure trove of sticky, fragrant heaven hidden within the larger acreage of tobacco—a botanical nesting doll—ingeniously concealed from the outside world by some enterprising stoner farmer (just before the Turn harshed everybody’s buzz).
He looks down and sees the makeshift pipe that was once a fountain pen, and the matchbook and dark crumbs of ashes lying around it.
Speed lets out a burst of dry laughter—a pothead’s nervous chuckle—and immediately regrets making the noise. He can smell the stench of multiple biters lurking somewhere nearby. Where the fuck is Matthew? Scanning the clearing, Speed cringes at the throbbing headache now threatening to split his skull open.
He struggles to his feet, dizziness and paranoia washing over him in equal measures, his Bushmaster assault rifle still slung over his shoulder. The walkers have yet to reveal themselves, but the smell is everywhere, as though it’s coming from all directions.
The terrible black odor of the undead has become a bellwether of imminent attacks—the stronger the reek, the greater the number. A faint hint of spoiled meat and feces usually indicates only a single creature, certainly no more than two or three, but the infinite variations that herald larger groups have become as cataloged and articulated as an elaborate wine list. A truckload of cow manure marinated in pond scum and ammonia indicates dozens. An ocean of spoiled Limburger cheese, maggot-infested garbage, black mold, and pus suggests hundreds, maybe a thousand. Right now, judging by the intensity of the stench, Speed is guessing at least fifty or sixty roaming nearby.
He raises his gun, wa
lks along the edge of the tobacco field, and calls out in a loud whisper, “Matt! Hey, Hennesey—where you at?”
No reply. Only the faintest of rustling noises to his immediate left—behind the wall of green—where the untended crop rises at least five or six feet high, consisting of old tobacco, ironweed, and wild bush. The enormous wrinkled leaves make a ghostly noise in the breeze, the whisper of papery friction, like match heads striking. Something moves sharklike out in the sea of khaki green.
Speed jerks toward the shadow. Something is moving slowly this way, the dry stalks and husks snapping in an arrhythmic tattoo as the clumsy footsteps approach. Raising the muzzle, Speed puts the crosshair on the dark mound skimming over the tops of the plants. He sucks in a breath. The figure is twenty-five yards away.
He begins squeezing the trigger when the sound of a voice makes him freeze.
“Yo!”
Speed jerks toward the voice and sees Matthew standing in front of him, out of breath, holding his Glock 23 with its silencer attached. Only a few years older than Speed, Matthew is taller and lankier and so weathered, wind-burned, and tan in his faded denims he looks like a walking piece of beef jerky.
“Jesus,” Speed utters, lowering the rifle. “Don’t fucking sneak up on me like that—just about shit my pants.”
“Get down,” Matthew orders softly yet firmly. “Now, Speed, do it.”
“Huh?” Still slightly woozy from the weed, Speed stares at his friend. “Do what?”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 2