The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  The point of the crowbar bursts through the top of the thing’s skull.

  For a moment, the thing merely stiffens, remaining upright, gaping emptily at its assailant as rivulets of black fluids pour down its forehead and over its face. Speed pulls the crowbar free with a ghastly smacking noise as the creature finally collapses in a heap of wet tissues.

  Lilly and the others gather around it with the mild interest of pathologists. “Is it me, or is that from the herd that burned?” she says, gazing down at it, poking its papery, blackened garb with the toe of her boot. The tattered clothing is charred crisp.

  “Looks like it, yeah,” Bob murmurs, staring at the abomination, thinking.

  “So that means … what?” David ponders the gruesome thing on the tunnel floor while holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth to ward off the stench, muffling his voice. “It found its way down here just recently?”

  “Yep.” Lilly kneels by it, taking a closer look at the catastrophic break wrenching its left leg and hip, the protrusion of bone like a misshapen ivory tusk. “My guess is, the thing fell.” She looks up at the ceiling, the roots and icicles of limestone hanging down. “Which doesn’t exactly give me a warm, secure feeling.”

  Bob is already inspecting the stalactites near the top of the giant piling.

  Matthew and Ben watch him. Finally Ben asks him what he’s looking for.

  “Not sure,” Bob murmurs, pondering the intricacies of the ceiling.

  He shines his flashlight up at the twists and tangles of roots, the fossilized beams, the calcium deposits shimmering like fool’s gold. Lilly joins him, and they exchange a look. She knows what he’s thinking.

  “Maybe this is a blessing in disguise,” Bob mumbles as he regards the ornate constellation of roots.

  Ben stares at him. “How the hell do you figure that?”

  “There’s a million different ways that thing could have fallen down here—culverts, sewer manholes, weak spots in viaducts.”

  “Yeah … so?”

  Bob looks at Ben. “I was planning on digging our way out when we get there, but if there are ways to fall in … that means there are ways to get out.”

  * * *

  They travel another three and a half miles before Reese starts seeing signs that they’re closing in on Carlinville. The first clue appears like a phantom in the beams of their flashlights and lamps: a thin curtain of dust sifting down through the silvery beams of light, and Lilly walks under it, shielding her face. The Xanax has worn off and she feels brittle and shaky as she shines her lamp up at the tunnel ceiling. The roots are vibrating with the weight of many, many, many shuffling feet.

  “Oh, fuck,” she mumbles, the sinking feeling tugging at her innards.

  The others gather around her, Bob shining his light up at the stirring whirls of dust. “Looks like the goddamn Seventh Infantry marching around up there.” He lets out a sour, exasperated breath. He pulls out the survey map. “According to the map, we’re right smack-dab in the middle of the town.” He shoots a glance at Lilly. “Gotta admit I was hoping the goddamn things would’ve cleared out by now.”

  Lilly pulls out one of her Rugers, checks the clip, snaps it back in. “Nothing we can do about it.” She checks her other pistol, shoves it back in the holster. “When we get up there, everybody remember: safeties off and watch your backs.”

  “We can get closer!” Reese’s voice comes from the shadows farther down the tunnel, where water has gathered. “I found another landmark!”

  The others stride toward the sound of his voice, checking their weapons, splashing through two or three inches of greasy standing water. Ahead of them, in the flicker of their flashlight beams, Reese Lee Hawthorne comes into view standing next to an antique iron stepladder embedded into the mortar wall.

  “What is it?” Lilly asks him as she approaches, drawing her Ruger, holding her flashlight next to the barrel. She aims the light up the steps to the circular iron object set into the roots of the ceiling.

  Reese explains, “This here has to be the manhole cover at the corner of Maple and Eighteenth.”

  Lilly looks at him as the others gather around them, slamming magazines into pistols, yanking levers on the sides of assault rifles. “How close is that to the heart of town?”

  “Less than a block.” Reese takes a deep breath. In the darkness, his lean, emaciated features shimmer with flop sweat.

  “And where’s the chapel they’re pinned down in? It’s a chapel, right?”

  A quick nod. “Yes, ma’am … it’s on the other side of the street.”

  “How far?”

  Reese chews his lip, thinking it over. A thin wisp of dust suddenly drifts down through their light beams, the vibrations still resonating through the ground. Reese swallows hard. “From the manhole cover? I don’t know exactly. I think it’s just across the street, little wood-frame place, white picket fence.”

  “Okay, everybody, listen up.” Lilly turns to the others, who push in closer, their eyes glinting with adrenaline in the shadows. “Who’s got the AR-15? Ben? Okay, you and I are going to go first, one at a time, followed by Reese, who’s going to identify the place for us.”

  “All right, got it, got it,” Ben Buchholz mutters nervously, gripping the rifle with white knuckles. All his bluster, all his macho posturing, all of it is gone. Evaporated. He looks like a little boy now trapped in the body of a loudmouthed redneck. “Ready when you are.”

  “Conserve your ammo as much as possible.” She looks at the others. “Use your bladed weapons whenever you can. That goes for everybody.”

  Nods all around, straps being tightened, belts secured, the handles of knives, machetes, and pickaxes at the ready. Their faces gleam with tension.

  Lilly turns to Reese. “There’s thirteen people up there, correct?”

  Reese nods.

  Lilly thinks about it. “Did you say six men and seven women?”

  “The other way around.”

  “Okay, everybody, time is of the essence here.” She goes to the bottom of the stepladder. Some of the flashlights around her are switched off, the tunnel getting darker. She pulls off her miner’s hat and tosses it to the tunnel floor. “In and out, quick and clean, that’s the best way to avoid getting swarmed. Find the chapel, get them out, get back here. Nothing to it.” She looks at Speed. “You think you can pry the thing open?”

  “You got it, Lilly.” Speed trots over to the ladder, climbs up, brushes aside roots and weeds, inhales dust, coughs, pulls his crowbar from his pack, and then starts working at the congealed, oxidized edges of the ancient manhole cover. “Look out below,” he warns.

  “Don’t let it fall,” Lilly calls up to him. “When you feel it give, hold it in place so that Ben and I can get back up there.”

  “Got ya.”

  After another minute of grunting and groaning from Speed—a span of time that feels to Lilly like a million years—the manhole cover creaks, and Speed holds on to it. “Okay, Lilly, got it.” He looks down. “Come on up.”

  Lilly climbs up next to Speed, and Ben clambers up halfway, pausing just a few inches below Lilly. The others gather around the base of the ladder, bracing themselves to spring into action.

  Lilly looks down at them. “On my signal, guys. You ready?”

  Nods all around, their eyes hot, air being swallowed nervously.

  Lilly takes a deep breath and turns back to the manhole cover. “Let’s hope they’ve thinned out a little bit up there,” she mutters, almost under her breath, essentially talking to herself. “Okay, here we go.” She swallows hard. “Ready, everybody.” Another breath. “NOW!”

  She pushes the manhole cover open, and daylight streams into the tunnel.

  Lilly climbs out and instantly lets out an involuntary, spontaneous gasp.

  * * *

  Time stands still as Lilly finds herself engulfed in a swarm of walkers so thick and densely packed, the mere odor of it takes her breath away—most of them so close to her as
to be indistinguishable from each other—a nebula of blackened faces, yellow teeth, and luminous eyes flashing in a blur, making a hellish racket of groans and slobbering, garbled gnashing noises. Only a fraction of a second passes before Lilly has the Ruger up and roaring, but in that horrible instant, the span over which a single synapse fires in her brain, she makes several observations.

  Through the milling throng of undead, she catches a fleeting glimpse of the little country chapel across the street, two doors down, windows boarded, timbers nailed across the entrance, maybe a hundred feet away, it’s hard to tell—the Cape Cod–style clapboard building with its weathered whitewashed cross rising up against the cornflower-blue sky, sandwiched between a boarded barbershop and a ramshackle play lot—the edifice too far away to judge the distance. But Lilly has no time to consider the options or abort the mission or even breathe because clawlike hands have already tangled themselves up in her sleeve, the left leg of her jeans, and the tail of her denim shirt. That’s when she manages to draw a Ruger .22 pistol with each hand and starts shooting.

  The first six blasts, three and three, come in quick succession, so loud they pierce Lilly’s left eardrum, the rounds driving the closest creatures back in eruptions of brain matter, rotting faces coming apart at point-blank range.

  “STAY IN THE TUNNEL!” she wails down at Ben and the others. “TOO MANY OF THEM! DON’T COME UP HERE!”

  She fires again at the next wave that presses in—three large males in ragged camo pants and hunting vests, and a gangly female in a tattered hospital gown—the blasts shearing the tops of three skulls and sending fountains of blood-mist into the clear air above the horde, the fourth one a direct hit between the eyes, the skull coming apart and exploding from the noxious gasses within.

  At the same time, Lilly manages to shove the manhole cover with her boot back across the opening, the iron disc dropping back in place with a dull, clanging thud. The last thing she sees in the darkness down there before the cover settles over the opening is Ben’s horror-stricken face, gaping up at her, pale and drawn, lips moving but no sound coming out, eyes raging with terror.

  Then Lilly’s moving, lurching toward the street, lowering her shoulder and ramming into about half a dozen of the things, knocking them over like bowling pins. The stench is tremendous, a miasma of human bile slow cooking in shit, and it nearly steals what’s left of Lilly’s breath. There are so many of them pushing in now that they tumble backward like dominoes as Lilly cuts a swath toward the church, firing as she goes, ears ringing, eyes watering with panic.

  These shots are less accurate—some of them going high into the sky, others punching holes in dead shoulders and necks but leaving heads intact. With nine rounds in each pistol—eight in each mag, one in each chamber—she goes through the remaining dozen bullets in short order. But by the time her pistols start clicking impotently, she realizes she’s halfway there.

  Through the tumbling, staggering bodies, she sees the chapel only forty or fifty feet away, and she sees that the boarded entrance has been pushed open slightly, and she sees a face peering out the gap—a man, middle aged, fair skinned, silvery-blond hair, dressed in a stained suit coat and pants, is motioning to her. He’s yelling something, but Lilly can’t quite make it out.

  More walkers close in on her, and she has no time to reload, so she jams the guns back in her belt and reaches for her collapsible shovel. The thing is thrust down a zippered pocket in her rucksack, and she has to work it free; she gets it out and up and swinging just as a rotting skeletal male lurches at her neck. The sharp edge of the shovel embeds itself in the thing’s temple, causing a clot of brain matter to spew out of its cranium before it falls. Another wave of attackers moves in, but Lilly doesn’t hesitate, she keeps swinging and moving toward the white clapboard building with singular purpose.

  She takes down another half dozen biters, and she gets to within thirty feet of the chapel, when she sees the fair-haired man in the filthy charcoal suit lurch out the door with a large sterling silver crucifix. The cross is the size of a small ax and gleams in the sunlight as the man lashes out at the mob in front of his church. “THIS WAY, SISTER!” he calls to Lilly. “YOU’RE ALMOST HOME FREE!”

  He impales the forehead of an older female walker as Lilly makes one last-ditch, heroic bid to reach the church in one piece.

  “C’MON, SISTER—ALMOST THERE!”

  * * *

  In the tunnel, only minutes earlier, when the resounding thud of the manhole cover came slamming down on the opening, and the clang pealed through the dark passageway, it was Bob who went a little berserk.

  “Fuck! Fuck! NO! NONONONONONO!” He comes running over to the bottom of the steps, his miner’s light bobbing and its beam jumping in the faces of the others. “THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?”

  Ben hops off the lowermost rung and lands hard on the floor, breathless, a little confused. “She—she said to—I was just—she said to get back down.”

  “Who the fuck put the manhole cover back?”

  “She did, Bob! She said to get back down!” Ben wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes wet with dread. “It happened real quick.”

  “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” Bob pulls his .357 from his hip and starts toward the ladder. The gun is unfamiliar in his hand—a newer model than the one he’s used to—a replacement for the one Calvin left in the field. “I’m gonna go get her, goddamn it! We can’t leave her out there!”

  Bob is halfway up the steps when Speed grabs his leg and pulls him back. “Pops, wait!” Speed’s grip feels like an iron vise. “We go together!” He gently pulls the older man back down the steps. “She’s a big girl, she’s handy with them Rugers, we should all just—”

  The sound of dust sifting down interrupts, a shuffling, thudding parade going on up above.

  Bob whirls and sees the thin swirl of powdery particulate in the beam of his miner’s light. The ceiling vibrates with the pressure of countless shuffling feet, all that dead weight milling about the streets of this doomed little village, and it gives Bob an idea. He sees another tendril of dust falling off to the right, and then another off to the left, and he says, “Wait a minute, wait.”

  “What?” Speed looks at him, and the others come over and press in.

  “I got a better idea.” Bob snaps his gnarled fingers and starts looking around the floor. “Somebody find something we can use to punch a hole in the ceiling.”

  * * *

  Lilly reaches the chapel doorway at the last possible instant, a cluster of ravenous moving corpses right on her heels, and she reaches out. The man in the doorway has moved to the edge of the front portico. He reaches out to her.

  The two hands clasp, and the man gently but firmly pulls Lilly across the threshold.

  Lilly stumbles through the doorway into a squalid vestibule lit by flickering kerosene lanterns, the malodorous air heavy with BO and rot. The man in the gray suit quickly pulls the double outer doors shut behind her, slamming them in the faces of the oncoming swarm.

  “You all right, missy?” The man turns to Lilly, who is trying to catch her breath, hunched over, hands on her knees.

  “Is she bit?”

  The voice comes from the other side of the foyer, a heavyset woman in a stained Braves T-shirt, Capri pants, and high-top sneakers peering out from an inner door. There are others behind her, crowding in and looking on—grimy, haunted faces in the shadows of a ruined sanctuary.

  “Take it easy, Sister Rose,” the man in the suit says. He shoves his enormous crucifix into a sheath on his belt, as though it’s a saber or medieval mace. “Bring our friend here some water.”

  “I’m good, thanks.” Lilly gets air into her lungs and looks around the cluttered vestibule, her left ear ringing unmercifully. Hymnals, trash, and blood spots cover the floor. The walls—once displaying bulletin boards with the dates of upcoming bake sales—now appear scourged, riddled with bullet holes and Rorschach patterns of dried blood as black as onyx paint. “Haven’t been bi
t, as far as I can tell.” Lilly looks up at the man. “Thanks for giving me a hand.”

  The man proffers a little gallant bow and a smile. “It’s entirely my pleasure.”

  In the lantern light Lilly gets a better look at the guy and sees that he’s a man in his forties, maybe younger, a boyish face that’s just beginning to age around the corners. With his lantern jaw, clear blue eyes, and big mop of Kennedy-esque hair just beginning to pepper with gray, he looks like a former child actor maybe fallen on hard times. His suit is well worn, shiny in the seat and shoulders, but the way he carries himself—his clip-on necktie still knotted neatly against his throat despite the flecks of blood and grime on the material—gives off an air of a leader, a man to be reckoned with.

  Lilly extends her hand. “I’m Lilly Caul.” She manages a smile. “Reverend Jeremiah, I presume?”

  The man’s smile fades slightly, his eyes narrowing and his big chiseled head cocking suddenly at the unlikely fact that she knows his name.

  THIRTEEN

  It takes Bob and the others several precious seconds to find a suitable spot in the tunnel ceiling through which to punch their hole. These are seconds that they would have preferred not to waste—they have no idea how Lilly is faring up there in the mob of walkers, whether she has made it to the chapel—but at the moment they need to be proactive and nobody has a better idea. In a series of hasty extrapolations, consultations with Reese, and glances at the survey map, Bob chooses a spot four-hundred-plus feet back down the tunnel, around a bend, and under a convoluted phalanx of stalactites—about the length of a football field between this spot and the heart of the swarm—in order to give them the optimum amount of room but still be close enough to get the horde’s attention.

  They use the square-edged spade that Matthew brought along, and Speed—probably the strongest of all of them—does the honors. The former defensive end weighs a hundred and ninety-five pounds, and Matthew and Ben have to get down on their hands and knees, elbow to elbow, directly underneath the spot, in order to give Speed something to stand on. They work quickly, communicating with very few words—Bob doing most of the talking—as Speed climbs onto their backs and begins to cut a divot in the ceiling with the shovel, his AR-15 dangling on a shoulder strap.