When the young man arrived a couple of hours ago, he was so dehydrated and malnourished he could barely move or speak. With Bob off in the tunnels, Gloria and Barbara provided the best emergency medical care they could muster under the circumstances. They gave Reese electrolytes, hooked him to a glucose drip, dressed his wounds, and gave him water and instant soup in small doses until he seemed stable enough to tell his story. When he got to the part about his group being pinned down in Carlinville by the mysterious horde, and then revealed why he risked his life to come all this way alone with meager supplies and no idea how to navigate the wild, Lilly decided to call in the committee.
Lilly looks at Bob as she says, “I might be wrong about this, but I’m thinking what we’re dealing with here is a part of the superherd.”
Bob gives her a nod. “The one that formed outside the prison.”
The young man on the gurney looks up as though awakening from a dream. “Superherd?”
Lilly looks back at Reese. “I think we dealt with a part of this same herd. Saw it forming not far from here a week ago.”
Ben interjects, “Goddamn herds are like amoebas—growing, separating, splitting off into multiple herds. Can’t get a goddamn break with these things. Getting worse every day.”
“I don’t know nothing about that,” the young man utters, his glazed stare riveted to Lilly now, the terror behind his eyes burning brightly. “But I do know that herd that pinned us down is still there, trust me. Once they surrounded Carlinville, they just stayed there … like, like, like … like bees swarming a hive.”
“How do you know the herd’s still there, though?” Gloria asks from the other side of the infirmary. The room is lit by halogen lamps on a single generator, and they flicker every few moments, giving the space a jittery quality. “Were you in contact with your people? In the woods, I mean? By radio or whatever?”
The young man shakes his head. “No … I just…” He looks up. “I was in contact with God.”
This causes almost everybody in the room to simultaneously look at the floor. The newcomer has been saying things like this every few minutes, and it’s getting a little awkward. Nobody has a problem with God around here—a little good-natured Bible thumping or Scripture quoting is part of the fabric of plague life—but right now, Lilly needs to focus on the practical, stay on-message, keep to the facts. Especially in light of what the young man is asking of them. She parses her words now. “This group you’re with, Reese,” she says. “It’s a church group?”
Reese Lee Hawthorne takes a deep breath. “Yes, ma’am … but we really don’t have no bricks-and-mortar church to speak of. Our church is pretty much just us and Reverend Jeremiah and the open road.” He looks down and swallows thickly again. “Before the Turn, we used to have a big old bus, carried our tent on the roof … Brother Jeremiah would do revival meetings up and down the eastern seaboard … baptisms and such.” His face twitches with grief, the horror causing tics at the corners of his mouth. His eyes well up. “That’s all gone now, though … all gone.” He looks at Lilly, wipes his eyes. “Satan’s army of walkers took it from us.”
A beat of silence presses down. Lilly watches the young man. “How many of you are there?”
He looks at her. “In Carlinville right now? Counting me? There’s fourteen of us.”
Lilly licks her lips and measures her words. “This Reverend Jeremiah? Is he … pinned down in Carlinville with the others?”
Reese nods. “Yes, ma’am.” Another flinch, another twinge of agonizing memory. “He saved our lives that night the river turned red.”
Lilly looks at Bob, and Bob gives her a look, and the others exchange a series of uneasy glances. Lilly turns back to the young man. “You don’t have to tell us what happened, Reese, if it’s too painful for you.”
The young man gets a dreamy look in his eyes, his expression going slack as though suddenly plunged under hypnosis. “Jeremiah always says the best way to deal with this plague is just to keep on going … keep on preaching and saving souls … It’s the best way to fight the devil.” Reese gets very still, gaping at the far corner of the room, as though some far-flung horror is kindling there in the shadows. “I remember it was hot that night … so hot and humid you had to work just to take a breath. Chattahoochee was like bathwater. We had our bus parked just north of Vinings … and we set up the tent about a quarter mile north along the river.” He pauses and with great effort swallows a mouthful of agony. “We started with some local men. Brother Jeremiah would take them down to the water, a part of the river that was maybe four, five feet deep … pretty deep for a baptism but that’s how the reverend likes to do it … like John the Baptist … total immersion, man.” Another pause. “He didn’t see them things moving around under the surface … they was upriver a ways, in the deeper part of the water.” He bows his head again as though his cranium now weighs a thousand tons. His voice is reduced to a whisper. “He didn’t see them things until it was too late.”
Lilly waits a respectful moment before licking her lips and saying, “It’s okay, Reese, you don’t have to—”
“He took a group of women down next … there was maybe five or six of ’em … all ages, a couple teenagers, an older woman, a few mothers.” Silence. “He was baptizing them one at a time, and they was singing ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ … and they was praisin’ and singin’ and fillin’ up with the spirit.” Silence. “’Heavenly Father, in your love you have called us … to know you … to trust you … to bind our life with yours.’” Silence. “And Jeremiah would take each gal in his strong arms like he was dancin’ with her … and he would dip her backward into the warm waters … splash, splash.” Silence. “And he would say, ‘Sister Jones … may God pour out his blessings upon your life today … so that you may walk in His abundance.’” Silence. “Then he’d dunk her in … splash … and … and…” Silence. “And then he’d take the next gal, and do the same thing … splash.” Silence. “It was the third or fourth woman.” Silence. “I think it was the fourth.” Silence. “When … all of a sudden … the reverend dipped her in the water … and … and…”
“Okay, Reese. That’s enough.” Lilly walks over to the young man, puts her hand on his shoulder. He jumps. “It’s okay, we get it.”
The young man looks at Lilly with an expression on his face that will likely live in Lilly’s nightmares from this moment on. “She didn’t have no head.” His face tightens, the tears coming. “The blood … it was … it was everywhere … Them things had been under the deep end moving around like sharks … and they came up from the deep … and there were screams … and Brother Jeremiah dropped the woman’s body and he tried to fight back with his silver cross … but now the water was moving like crazy with them things and the river was turning beet red … and … and … I tried to dive in and help … and then more women were getting pulled under … and the water was turning the darkest shade of red you ever saw.”
Silence.
Not a single person in that infirmary moves or speaks or makes eye contact with the young man.
Reese drops his head and tears track down his face, his voice crumbling. “Reverend Jeremiah … he got most of them things with his big sterling cross … got many of us out of that water in one piece … He saved my ass, I’ll tell you that … but that river turned the deepest shade of red … The water … I never seen anything like that … so red … deep, deep red … like in the Bible at the End Days.”
Silence.
Lilly looks down at the floor, figuring she might as well let him get it all out.
“Them poor women that got ate that night … they was praying as they went down … I heard ’em praying … them things devouring them … the river running red … I heard their voices under the screaming … ‘The Lord is my shepherd … He makes me to lie down in green pastures … He leads me beside quiet waters … He refreshes my soul.’” Silence. Snuffling. Silent tears. “‘Even though I walk through the darkest valley … I will … I wi
ll fear no evil.’” Silence. Shoulders slumping now, head lolled forward as though about to pass out. “And then … and then…” Silence. Broken sobbing. “We s-saw them coming out of the water … like the centurions … ragged, bloated … faces the color of fish bellies … shark eyes … they were coming for us … we were backing away toward the bus … Satan sent them after us … and we … we … got out of there … We left our sisters and we got out of there and … and … oh … ohhhhhnnnnngghh!”
The young man finally lets the convulsions of grief and horror rock through him until he can no longer speak. He slips off the edge of the gurney. Lilly lunges toward him, and he falls into her arms and weeps. He weeps and weeps into her midsection as she holds him in an awkward embrace for a few agonizing moments.
She turns and starts to say something to Bob when she notices that Bob is already fumbling with a sterile needle and small vial of sedative across the room. He preps the hypo while the others watch in stunned silence. Lilly gives a nod, and Bob comes over and administers the drug.
The young man named Reese Lee Hawthorne gazes up at Lilly once before sliding out of her arms and collapsing to the floor in a state of semiconsciousness.
Bob calls out over his shoulder, “Ben! Matthew! Gimme a hand here!”
They converge on the body of the young newcomer, lift him off the floor, and carry him across the room to a padded gurney pushed against the wall. They gently set him down on the bed, cover him with a sheet, and watch his eyes go to half-mast … and then close. For a moment, nobody says anything. The group huddles around the bed, watching the young man’s chest softly rising and falling.
At last, Lilly turns and fixes her gaze on Barbara Stern. “Stay with him, Barbara, watch for any changes.” She looks at the others. “The rest of you, let’s talk outside in the corridor.”
* * *
Lilly has never believed in ghosts. As a little girl, she enjoyed her father’s “spook stories,” many of them told on the porch of their house in Marietta, usually on autumn nights with the scent of woodsmoke and burning leaves on the breeze. Everett Caul would tell tales of vanishing hitchhikers and disappearing cabinets and mysterious seagoing vessels doomed to eternally circle the ocean, and Lilly would lap it all up. She also adored the delicious shudders she would get when reading the twist ending of a Shirley Jackson novel, or watching the denouement of an X-Files show, or devouring books from the school library such as Strange but True Tales of the Supernatural. But she never truly believed in such a thing as a haunting. Until now.
With the Governor a mere memory, dead and gone now for several weeks, the subterranean labyrinth beneath the racetrack arena still vibrates with his presence, as haunted as any drafty Victorian mansion. His brutal interrogations in the cinder-block-lined service bays still echo in Lilly’s midbrain, and the smell down here—that gritty, chalky, moldy odor of ancient axle grease and old rubber—still evokes the dark machinations of a madman. Even the faint stench of walkers, as pungent as the insides of a discarded garbage can, still emanates from the cells in which they were kept hungry and at the ready for the gladiatorial games. Lilly finds all this swirling through the back of her consciousness as she tries to focus on the challenges at hand, and the drawn, nervous faces of her peers gathered around her … waiting.
“Okay, obviously this kid is messed up from his time alone in the sticks.” Lilly rubs her eyes, leaning against the wall outside the infirmary, feeling the feverish gazes of the six other committee members. “I’m thinking we wait until he’s healed up before we make any moves.”
Ben Buchholz speaks up, his droopy eyes glittering with tension. “So this means we’re seriously considering a rescue mission here?”
“What are you saying, Ben?” David Stern chimes in. “You don’t want to go after these people? You just want to let them die on the vine?”
“I didn’t say that.” Ben flashes a glowering look at David. “All I’m saying is, we’re really going out on a limb if we try and find these people.”
“I have to agree with Ben.” Gloria Pyne looks at Lilly. “We have no idea how much of this herd is still out there—it could be replenishing itself, growing again—and we just don’t have the people to spare here.”
“Everything we do comes with a calculated risk,” Lilly counters. “We’re talking about fourteen people here, we’re kind of obligated to try. Right? I mean, unless I’m mistaken, these people would most likely do the same for us.”
“I’m sorry, Lilly.” Matthew Hennesey has a sheepish look on his face. “I gotta go with Ben and Glo on this one. How do you know these people would do the same for us? I mean, really. I believe in the goodness of humanity as much as the next guy, but come on. For all you know, these people are fucking assholes.”
“Thank you.” Ben gives a satisfied nod to Matthew. “That’s exactly what I was thinking.” He looks at David. “Fucking preachers—nine out of ten of them are fucking pedophiles.”
“Are you serious?” David stares Ben down, and the corridor seems to constrict in the slipstream of their anger. “That’s the reason you don’t want to go after them? On moral grounds?”
Ben gives a shrug. “You can spin it any way you want.”
“You sure it’s not a more personal reason? Self-preservation, maybe?”
“Why don’t you just say it?” Ben takes a provocative step toward David. “Why don’t you just say what you’re thinking—that I’m a chickenshit coward, maybe?”
“Whoa, gentlemen—” Lilly starts to get between them, but David moves to within inches of Ben.
“I didn’t say you were chickenshit, Ben. Paranoid, maybe. Surly, perhaps.”
“Get away from me.” Ben shoves the older man back a few inches. “Before I wipe that smug smile off your face.”
“Hey!” Lilly raises her voice, pushing Ben back. “Back it down, both of you!”
The two men fix their gazes on each other as Lilly turns to address everyone in the corridor.
“We’ve been down this road before—bickering and quarreling over every decision. I won’t have it!” She pauses for emphasis. “Here’s a news bulletin for you: Our lives are on the line here. You want to turn this town into the Wild West, you keep on doing this macho sixth-grade playground bullshit! Oh, and by the way, you can find somebody else to run things, because I’m about this far from giving fucking notice!” Another pause. She has everybody’s attention now. She looks at every face as she softens slightly, her voice dropping a register. “All I’m asking you to do is take a deep breath, step back, and look at this logically. What we have here is a risk-reward situation. Yes, it does involve crossing dangerous territory, putting ourselves out there for these people, but you gotta calculate the rewards. We need more people to survive. I’m not sure we can keep this town safe with only twenty-five, thirty people. We barely have enough people for three shifts on the wall each day. We need strong backs, sharp eyes, people who are willing to pitch in. I don’t know from church groups—I’m an agnostic—but I do know these people are basically not going to survive if we don’t go get them. So I need everybody to be together on this.”
Ben stares at the floor. “That’s a great speech, Lilly, but you can go without me.”
Lilly’s chest tightens with anger, her fists clenching. “You got a short memory, Ben. If I’m not mistaken it was only ten days ago—”
“Lilly, I’m sorry,” Gloria interrupts in a low voice, a voice tempered with shame. She looks at Lilly with wet eyes. “I appreciate all you done for us. Really, I do. Stepping up and all. But I just ain’t got it in me to put my ass on the line for these people.”
Lilly can hardly breathe, the fury rising up her gorge and strangling her. “Really? Seriously? That’s your legacy? That’s how you honor the memory of people like Austin Ballard? Austin put his ass on the line for you, Gloria. And you, Ben. And you, Matthew! He lost his life for his trouble!” Lilly swallows her rage, a red filter drawing down over her eyesight, her throat going dr
y. “Go ahead! Stay behind the wall! Stay safe! Tell yourselves you’re safe behind these walls! But you’re not! You’re not! Because we are all part of the same war! It’s a war with ourselves! And if you hide from it, you will die! YOU WILL DIE!”
All at once Lilly realizes she is out of breath, and the others are all looking down at the floor like children who have been sent to bed without dinner, and a low, gravelly voice has said something behind her and Lilly has only partially heard it in one ear. She sees Bob Stookey leaning against the door to the infirmary. He’s been there all along, calmly listening to the shouting match, and now he’s finally said something that Lilly has only half heard. “What was that, Bob?”
Bob looks at her, looks at the others. “I said, what if I could seriously cut down the risk involved here?”
This is met with stone silence, the strange statement hanging in the air.
Lilly looks at him. “Okay, I’ll bite. What the hell are you talking about?”
Bob’s deep-set eyes, nestled in pockets of wrinkles, almost twinkle as he begins to explain.
* * *
The rest of the day passes without incident or altercation. The children play kickball in the square while most of the adults help Lilly till the arena infield. Lilly has drawn up plans for rows of vegetables as well as sturdy crops like soybeans and corn from which both food and energy sources can be harvested. She has big plans for the future of Woodbury in terms of renewables and has already found diagrams in the library for homemade solar cells and heaters.
That afternoon, in the infirmary under the racetrack, Bob nurses the young man from the church group back to health with forced fluids, vitamin B12 injections, and old war stories from the Middle East. The newcomer takes to Bob, which is ironic, since Bob has never been too fond of people with evangelical tendencies. But Bob is a born medic—a good soldier first and foremost—and he treats patients with equal-opportunity care.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 12