“For what?”
“Just think about it for a second.” His old hound dog eyes smolder with embers of excitement. In this light, his face looks positively spectral, the deep creases and lines accentuating his enthusiasm. Lilly has never seen him like this. Even when Megan Lafferty was alive, and old Bob was harboring the secret crush of his life, traipsing around town like a lovelorn teenager, he didn’t look like this. The potential of this discovery has taken years off him. “We can move back and forth, travel for miles without risking exposure—without ever setting foot aboveground until we get to where we’re going.”
“I thought you said there were walkers down there, like the one that got Hap.”
“A few, yeah, but hell, we can clear them out, maybe reinforce some of the tunnel walls and whatnot. You ask me, this is definitely worth the effort.”
Lilly thinks about it for a moment, chewing a fingernail. “What would you need—manpower-wise, equipment-wise?”
Bob purses his lips. “I’m thinking maybe two or three other men, and if I could figure out a way to get power down there without having to run a three-mile-long extension cord or asphyxiating us with carbon monoxide from the generators … it would make life a hell of a lot easier.”
Lilly sighs. “Extension cords and generators we got, it’s the goddamn fuel issue that’s killing us.”
Bob runs fingers through his dark, greasy hair. “Walmart filling station is pretty much S-O-L … and them wrecks along Eighty-five and Eighteen are picked clean.”
“What about the loading dock at Ingles Market?
“Ran dry ages ago.”
“What about the farm implements at Deforest? Don’t they keep those gassed up?”
“We’ll check it again, I ain’t sure, maybe out back there’s a few that we haven’t sucked dry.”
“There’s gotta be a source we haven’t tapped.”
Bob looks across the ancient document on the table, his gaze playing over the network of tunnels. “Gotta move farther outside the neighborhood.”
Lilly gazes beyond the shadows of the overturned bookshelves. “Still got those crates of cooking oil in the warehouse.”
“Yeah, great … if you want to make a slew of hush puppies for the Friday night fish fry, you’re in business.”
“What about biodiesel, though—?”
“What about it?”
“Don’t you make that shit from cooking oils?”
Bob lets out a ragged sigh. “Yeah, if you got the recipe, the know-how.”
Lilly looks around the ransacked library. “I’ll wager we can research it right here.”
Bob gives her a grin. “Not a bad idea, Lilly. You’re getting this leadership thing down.”
She lets out a grunt. “I don’t know about that.”
Bob gazes at the document. “Something tells me the answer to a lot of this stuff is right in front of our noses.” He looks at Lilly. “Sooner I get back down there, the sooner we figure out where this thing’s gonna take us.”
After a long beat of silence, Lilly says, “Just make sure you know how many walkers you’re dealing with when you go spelunking down there again.”
Bob doesn’t offer any response, only a quick, furtive glance back at the survey map.
* * *
The next day dawns muggy and overcast, the late spring weather starting to give way to the oppressive heat of a Georgia summer. By seven o’clock the mercury has already reached seventy-five degrees, and the woods and hollows to the east of town buzz with insects. Soon the drone of crickets, frogs, sparrows, and thrashers rises to a dull roar.
The ambient noise is so all-consuming that the lone figure stumbling through the deep woods along Riggins Ferry Road thinks he’s hearing things.
He bangs into trees, his balance thrown off by exhaustion, terror, and starvation. He splashes through swampy patches and nearly stumbles, at one point falling to his knees, nearly going face-first in the mire. But he gets back up. He keeps moving. At all costs, he keeps moving. Sunburned, dehydrated, in the early stages of shock, Reese Lee Hawthorne hears voices in the din of the woodland fauna around him, the sounds of preachers hollering fire-and-brimstone sermons, the low rumble of the earth rending apart.
When he reaches the clearing adjacent to Riggins Ferry and sees the string of abandoned cars along the scorched asphalt two-lane, the wreckage piled up and stretching as far as the eye can see—a frozen, eternal traffic jam—he nearly collapses, but somehow, moving on sheer adrenaline now, he keeps staggering forward.
In the distance he sees the signs of a town. In his bleary vision, the objects materializing like those of a dream, he sees the outskirts of a once tidy little farming community: the landscaped parkways and boulevards now overgrown with weeds, littered with unidentifiable detritus and human remains, concertina wire tangled around some of the street signs—a typical postplague landscape. A few scattered walkers roam the city limits like the forgotten homeless, another common sight outside survivor settlements. Like ubiquitous moths drawn to the flames of human life, a certain number of walkers can always be found in close proximity to people.
Reese sees the wall. About three hundred yards away now, the center of the town tucked behind it, the scarred planking of a giant barricade stretches for about a block and a half in either direction. There’s an opening at the southeast corner, blocked by a grime-covered semicab. Some of the planks look stained with soot, as though a fire raged through this area not long ago. Some of the rooftops behind the wall look scorched and fire damaged. Even the weed-whiskered roads and vacant lots look burned.
Reese hears the sudden growl of a walker off his right flank.
Reaching for his .38—he has only one bullet left in the chamber—he loses his balance again and falls. He lands hard on his left shoulder, the pain shooting down his arm and ribs. The sudden agony takes his breath away as he rolls onto his back and two-hands the gun. The walker approaches—a large female, obese and feminine in life, with a lopsided bouffant and a tattered sundress—her mouth a blackened divot in her skull. Reese waits until she’s within point-blank range and then fires at her scalp, blowing a hole in her head the size of a small saucer.
The hole gushes black brain matter and murky fluids with the force of a fountain, as the fat woman collapses into the weeds.
Reese struggles to his feet—his last bullet gone, his head spinning from pain and fear—and he makes one last-ditch effort to outrun the other walkers drawn by the noise, now coming toward him from all sides. He charges across the railroad tracks, past the train sheds, and across the vacant lot outside Woodbury’s main drag. He gets close enough to the wall to see a single individual—a middle-aged man—with some kind of military-grade rifle.
“WHOA, KEMOSABE!” The sound of a second man calling out to Reese echoes across the lots. “THAT’S FAR ENOUGH!”
Reese falls to his knees on the edge of Folk Avenue, a hundred yards east of the very same derelict drugstore where Lilly found her pregnancy test kit last month, the same property under which Bob and his team now creep through the subterranean darkness. “P-please,” Reese huffs and puffs, gasping for breath on his hands and knees in the dirt. “P-please l-let me in, I n-need—”
“ARE YOU ALONE?”
In the rising sun, the face of David Stern becomes visible peering over the top of a cherry picker abutted against the wall, his wrinkled visage gray and drawn in the harsh light. But even amid the tension now reverberating between the two men, there’s a certain gentle quality to David’s manner, apparent in his baggy eyes and rich baritone, even at this distance. Reese Lee Hawthorne now gasps for breath on the ground, sensing the other walkers closing in on him. He has only a minute or two to convince this older gentleman with the rifle that he means no harm. “Yes, sir!” Reese calls out. “I’m all alone and n-need help … not just for me but for my family, too!”
A tense beat of silence passes as David lowers his weapon.
* * *
Thousa
nds of feet down the main conduit, at least a mile and a half of tunnel behind them, the stagnant air getting exceedingly cold and clammy and malodorous, the four men encounter their first cave-in.
“Aw, shit, look at this,” Bob says to the others, pausing to wipe his sweaty brow with a snotty bandanna. His flashlight illuminates the wall of dirt about fifty yards away, drifted against the tunnel wall, blocking their path.
They join each other in the center of the tunnel, their torch beams sweeping the gritty darkness, the odor of decay as strong as the inside of a dirty sock. Ben pushes his Caterpillar cap back on his balding, sweat-damp scalp and narrows his pouchy eyes as he takes in the obstruction. “Looks like the roof of the tunnel caved in.”
“Fuck … I thought we had this thing licked,” Speed complains with a crestfallen tone in his voice. The first mile of their combination reconnaissance and cleanup mission had gone off without a hitch—no walkers in sight, the tunnel clear and dry, and only a few remnants of campfires and rest stops here and there from a century and a half earlier. Each man had brought along a gunnysack filled with tools—shovel, pickax, crowbar, hammer, pruning sheers, nails, spare two-by-fours, batteries, brushes, and white paint for leaving geographical marks and notes.
“Miners call that a bounce,” Matthew comments absently, glancing down at his pedometer. He found the device in the drugstore and decided to keep it clipped to his belt in order to help them keep track of not only how far they were penetrating the tunnel but also, in conjunction with a compass, their location up top. “Sometimes a small tremor will do it, something that goes undetected aboveground.” Matthew comes from Blue Ridge, Kentucky—coal country—his daddy a lifelong miner, as well as his daddy’s daddy. Which is probably what made him so antsy to get the hell out of Blue Ridge. His tradesman’s license was his ticket out. The real estate bubble in Lexington gave him enough work as a tuck pointer and brick man to start a pretty decent life before the bubble burst. “Might be all she wrote,” he mutters, staring at the readout on the pedometer, “especially if the tunnel beyond it has caved.”
Bob starts toward the cave-in. “Matt, do me a favor and give me an exact footage count over here.” Bob approaches the sloping wall of earth that rises up to the ancient stalactites of limestone and roots hanging from the ceiling. He kneels by the obstruction.
Matthew joins him, pulling out the pedometer and reading the display. “Looks like … exactly eight thousand two hundred and eleven feet.”
Bob gazes up at the ceiling of roots. Then he takes a closer look at the earthen obstruction. He reaches out and feels the wall of loose earth. It’s granular and dry, some of the tiny crumbs of earth scuttling down the slope when Bob takes his hand away. “I’m no expert, like Mr. Hennesey here,” Bob says, “but this looks recent to me.” He pulls a folded map from his pocket as the other two men join them. He looks up at the ceiling again. “Eighty-two hundred and eleven feet is what?” He spreads the map out on the hard-packed earth of the tunnel floor. “If I’m not mistaken, that’s over a mile and a half?”
“About a mile and three-quarters due east of town,” Ben surmises.
“Shine that light down here, Ben.” With a grimy thumbnail, Bob traces the route. “As the crow flies … we should be right under Elkins Creek, maybe even all the way to Dripping Rock Road.”
“How far you think this thing goes?” Speed chimes in.
Ben lets out an incredulous grunt. “Sure as hell doesn’t go all the way to Canada.”
“It does make sense that they would head east,” Matthew surmises. “The slaves, I’m talking about.”
“East to the border states, maybe, Maryland, D.C.” Bob studies the map. “My guess is, this hooks up with another—”
A noise cuts him off, a slight tremble in the wall, a trickle of loose earth rolling down. Each man goes for his weapon. Muzzles snap up, front sights on the wall. Bob has a .357 Magnum with a four-inch barrel, which he has instinctively drawn from a short holster.
“Get away from the wall, Bob,” Ben warns suddenly, backing off, his Bushmaster rifle raised and ready to rock and roll.
Bob folds up the map with one hand, holding the revolver with the other, but he doesn’t see the dirt wall shuddering down by his leg until it’s too late.
The men hear the muffled shuffling noise before they see the object protruding from the earth. Bob feels pressure on his leg, looks down, and sees the blackened hand that has just burst through the dirt wall and latched onto his pant leg like a grappling hook.
“FUCK!” Bob jerks with an involuntary start, pulling his leg back.
The walker forces its way through the wall, a large male with mossy hair dangling down across its sunken, filth-encrusted face. The remnants of an orange construction worker’s vest still cling to its ragged body. The thing opens its mouth to expose a row of wormy gray teeth, and it snaps cobralike at Bob’s leg.
“Duck down, Bob—NOW!” Ben’s voice gets Bob moving, and Bob hits the deck right as the first controlled burst flares hot and bright out of Ben’s AR-15. Four blasts connect with the top of the thing’s skull.
The former construction worker instantly collapses as the top of its head shatters and its skull fountains black fluids all over Bob’s lower half. It feels like greasy bile soaking his pants. “Goddamn it,” Bob complains as he scoots back on his ass, fumbling for his gun. “Fucking piece of shit puss-bag cocksucker!”
“There’s more of ’em!” Speed indicates the upper part of the dirt wall. “Look!”
Like contorted plants sprouting in time lapse, more arms burst through the dirt. Some lanky and long, others emaciated and withered, they push their way through the loose earth and claw at the air. Fingers blackened from decay, some of the hands clench open and shut with such puppetlike vigor they remind Bob for a single crazy instant of Venus flytraps. The men raise their weapons, cocking mechanisms snapping back, flashlight beams sweeping up, Bob taking aim from a sitting position.
Matthew lets out a bellowing cry: “BLOW THEM FUCKERS AWAY!”
For several moments, the fusillade fills the tunnel with tremendous light and noise as innumerable rounds are emptied into the wall. Ricochets spark off rocks, ping off stalactites, and penetrate calcium deposits, the cordite smoke gathering, the booming reports making ears ring, the clatter echoing down the length of the passageway. Soon, Bob can’t hear a fucking thing, and he can barely see through the haze as the thunderous barrage continues unabated, strafing the wall of earth, until the volley of gunfire causes a small avalanche, tearing a giant doorway in the dirt wall, revealing the half dozen walkers on the other side now popping like blood-filled balloons. Heads erupt and gush, bodies jitterbugging, blood-mist pulsing and flinging off into space. After another excruciating moment, the giant maw in the dirt obstruction reveals that all of the half dozen or so walkers have folded to the ground, and the tunnel beyond the wall is now all clear and ringing with the echoes of high-powered gunfire. Beyond the carnage, which is now strewn across the hard pack, glistening in the gloom and faintly steaming, the tunnel extends into the darkness for an undetermined distance before it curves off to the right.
“HOLD YOUR FIRE!” Bob screams at the others, his ears ringing so severely he can hardly hear his own voice. Another noise crackles nearby, tugging at his attention, as the last blast roars out of Matthew’s AK-47, ricocheting with an enormous ping off the tunnel wall on the other side of the gaping cavity in the dirt.
“GODDAMN IT, STOP FUCKING SHOOTING!” Bob struggles to his feet. He hears a tinny voice crackling out of his radio. He reaches for the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt and fumbles for the volume knob. He turns it up and hears Gloria Pyne’s voice: “Bob … you copy, Bob? Can you hear me? Hello, Bob!”
Bob thumbs the button: “Gloria? It’s Bob, go ahead.”
“Bob, we got a situation here, you might want to come on back.”
Bob looks at the others. Matthew ejects a spent magazine, the clip bouncing off the earth floor. Ben
and Speed stare at him, waiting. Bob presses the switch: “Negative copy on that, Glo … say again.”
Through the crackle of static: “I said we got a bit of a situation brewing here, and Lilly wanted me to round you guys up and get you back here.”
Bob blinks, thumbs the button: “What’s going on, Gloria?”
Through the speaker: “I think it’s better you just come back and check it out.”
Bob sighs. “Can’t Lilly handle this herself? We’re making progress down here.”
“I don’t know, Bob. I just work here.”
“Can you put Lilly on?”
“Bob, come on. She told me to get you back, now get your fat, hairy ass back here!”
The click echoes down the tunnel as the other three men stare at Bob.
TEN
In the makeshift infirmary under the racetrack, the young man sits shirtless on the edge of a gurney, hugging himself with his spindly arms, his midsection wrapped with thick gauze bandages where he had fallen and broken two ribs. His skin is mottled with the abrasions and scars of exposure. His ferretlike face stays downturned as he breathlessly speaks. “Never seen a herd like the one came at us that night, never seen that many in one place. Lost five of our people that night. Like I said, it was bad … real bad. Got pinned down in a place called Carlinville, about ten, fifteen miles from here.”
The overhead lights flicker and buzz. Lilly stands across the room, listening intently with a paper cup of coffee going cold in her hand. The air smells of metallic chemicals, blood and ammonia. Lilly’s scalp prickles as she puts the puzzle pieces together in her mind. “Can I ask when this was, Reese? Can you remember how many days ago this was?”
The young man swallows hard and blinks as he tries to calculate the passage of time. “Guess it was … what? Maybe a week ago now?” He looks at Lilly with bloodshot eyes and a trembling jaw. “I kind of lost track of time out there, to tell ya the truth. Still sortin’ things out.”
“It’s okay … can’t say I blame you.” Lilly glances across the room at the others now listening closely to the young man’s story. Bob stands near the steel sink basin, his arms crossed judiciously across his chest, a stethoscope around his neck. Barbara and David Stern sit side by side on the edge of a desk. Matthew, Ben, Gloria, and Calvin stand on the other side of the room near the equipment hutch, each of them silently chewing on every word.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 11