“How do we know there ain’t pavement directly above us?” Ben wants to know, still on his hands and knees on the floor, his voice strained with effort, the weight of Speed’s clodhopper boots pressing between his shoulder blades. “How do you know it’ll break through?”
“I don’t,” Bob mumbles as he turns to David. “Look in the front flap of my backpack, see if that dental mirror we found at the drugstore is still in there.”
While all this is going on, the thumping sound of Speed slamming the blade into the roots overhead continues, a loud drumbeat, each impact sending a fresh load of dirt sifting down into the darkness. The hard Georgia clay is unyielding, but Speed puts his estimable shoulder and neck muscles into the job.
A few feet away, in the darkness, looking on nervously, Reese chews his fingernails.
An invisible stopwatch ticks in Bob’s brain as he waits for Speed to break through. A couple of minutes have elapsed now since Lilly was plunged into the herd, alone, exposed, fighting her way through the throngs. The sound of her gunfire has ceased. Good news if she made it to the chapel; very, very bad news if she ran out of ammo or got engulfed—and now Bob’s heart begins to race.
“Whoa!” Speed jerks back when a huge spadeful of dirt cascades onto the backs of Matthew and Ben. Daylight streams into the tunnel—a blazing yellow nimbus—diffused by all the dust. The walker stench is immediately evident as though somebody just opened a garbage can. “We’re through! We’re through!”
Bob steps closer. “Okay, now blast a few controlled bursts out the hole, not too many, don’t waste a lot of ammo, just enough to get their attention.”
“You got it.” Speed tosses the shovel aside and swings his AR-15 up at the gaping hole in the ceiling. He sticks the barrel out. “Here goes!”
The roar of the assault rifle ignites the darkness with light and noise.
Reese and David cover their ears, Bob still fidgeting. The two men on the ground yell something at each other that nobody else can hear. At last, after the third short burst, Speed ejects the magazine. The metal clip falls directly onto Ben’s back. “Ouch! Goddamn it, do you mind?”
“Sorry, sorry … coming down.”
Speed awkwardly hops off the trembling backs of the two men on the ground, slamming a fresh mag into the rifle’s receiver breach.
“Can we fucking get up now?” Ben has run out of patience, his voice quavering with rage.
“No, stay there for one more second,” Bob says, and then looks at the others. “All together, everybody, make a big fucking racket!”
Bob starts screaming and whooping and hollering under the hole in the ceiling, and the others follow suit. Soon the tunnel fills with the riotous sound of their voices bouncing around the fossilized walls, a wild party in full swing, a strange hullabaloo in such a grim, cryptlike space. At last Bob shoots a hand up to cut them off. “Okay, lemme take a look.”
He climbs up onto Ben and Matthew, and he sees that the hole in the ceiling is bigger than he thought—about the size of a hubcap—and he carefully prods the dental mirror up into daylight and angles it so he can get a glimpse of the street.
The reflection in that postage-stamp-sized mirror is horrifying.
A tiny cameo portrait of hell on earth.
* * *
“Brother Jeremiah, look! Look what’s happening outside!” The fat woman in Capri pants peers through a narrow gap in the boarded window.
The rest of the people in the room—stunned only moments ago by the sound of automatic gunfire in the distance—fall silent immediately and watch the preacher rush over to the window.
He looks out and sees what the lady is talking about. He becomes very still, steps back, turns, and looks directly at Lilly. Then he does something that not only fascinates Lilly but will live in the back of her thoughts, haunting her, for days. The man adjusts his clip-on tie. He does this as though he’s about to go on stage or deliver a sermon. He fiddles with it for just an instant, and if Lilly had blinked she would have missed it, but it is so odd and out of place and anachronistic that it burns itself into her brain. Then Jeremiah says, “We don’t have much time. Your friends have coaxed the horde away from the building.”
Lilly looks at him. “Is there a straight shot to the manhole on the other side of the street?”
“There is indeed.” He turns to the others. “Everybody grab whatever you can carry on your backs. We have been given a second chance by the Good Lord as well as these fine people—hurry up, now, just the bare essentials.”
The others spring into action, tearing open knapsacks, tossing unnecessary items onto the cluttered floor. Makeup mirrors, extra shoes, paperback books, keys, and coffee cups go spinning across the parquet tiles. Lilly watches for a moment, mesmerized by the dynamic between the preacher and his people. The seven men and six women—all ages and sizes—follow the man’s instructions with the guileless obedience of nursery school students—despite the fact that it’s a motley, heterogeneous assemblage of former housewives, laborers, matrons, and old codgers from the deepest backwaters of the Old South.
In addition to the plump lady in the Capri pants, named Rose, the others have managed to hastily introduce themselves to Lilly, and now Lilly’s brain swims with names and hometowns and brief tales of how none of them would be alive right now if it weren’t for Reverend Jeremiah. Oddly, the preacher had more questions for Lilly than she had for him. He wanted to know what kind of community she was building in Woodbury, what kind of resources she had, and most important, why she had come all this way just to save them. Folks are careful nowadays not to just blithely go off with the first sentient human that happens along. Lilly is no different. From the moment she set foot in the chapel, she had been giving the minister and his flock the once-over, judging faces, measuring handshakes, scrutinizing the look in their eyes.
For the most part, these people seem normal, albeit road scarred and traumatized by loss.
At one point, Lilly had noticed moving shadows and noises coming from a side room along the sanctuary and asked Jeremiah about it. After all the heads had bowed, Jeremiah had rubbed his eyes sadly and said in a soft voice, “Them are the less fortunate of our group, the ones who … fell to the beasts.” At that point Lilly had peered around the corner of the doorway and got a glimpse of two males and one female bound to the wall with makeshift chains and cables around their necks, their milky eyes fixed on the void before them, their puckered mouths moving impotently.
Now Lilly puts all these considerations out of her mind as she rushes across the room to the window, peers out, and sees the intersection of narrow streets outside slowly clearing as if some magic dog whistle were beckoning the horde away from the chapel. In just a few more seconds, the street corner will be completely clear. Lilly pulls out her pistols one at a time, checks the magazines as if the empty cartridges might have magically regenerated more bullets. She sees that they’re still empty, replaces them, and shoves the pistols back into their holsters.
Jeremiah comes over to her. “Alas, Sister Lilly, we have only a couple weapons.” He hurriedly waves a pair of his male congregants over. “This here is Brother Stephen.” He motions to a gangly young man in his midtwenties with a tattered short-sleeve dress shirt, bow tie, and black trousers. He looks like a worn-out Mormon missionary who has rung too many doorbells. He holds a single-barrel pump-action shotgun and gives Lilly a nod.
“It’s a Mossberg, ma’am, loaded with deer shot,” he says to her, as though this explains everything. “Ain’t as accurate as a rifle, but it’ll do quite a bit of damage at close range.”
Lilly nods nervously. “Okay, stay close to the front of the group.”
“We got one more firearm,” the preacher says, and turns to another man—older, weathered, wearing a Caterpillar tractor cap and chewing a plug of Red Man—who had already introduced himself to Lilly as a traveling Bible salesman. “You already met Anthony here.”
The older man holds up an ancient revolver, so o
ld the blue steel has turned gray. “It ain’t much to look at but it got my daddy through Korea and forty-seven years under the counter at his hardware store.”
“Okay, okay, good, good … we’ll hope these guns won’t have to be fired right now.” She looks at each man. “Do you understand what I’m saying? It’s really important that you do not fire unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
The men nod, and Reverend Jeremiah gives them a stern look. “You boys listen to this lady, do exactly as she says. You got that?” He turns to the rest of the group. “That goes for everybody. With the help of our Lord and Savior, this woman here is gonna save our behinds.”
By this point, all essential items have been secured into knapsacks, and the congregants have pressed in toward the front door. Lilly can smell old sweat leaching out of their skin, body odor under their filthy clothes. Starvation and chronic terror have taken a toll on their faces. Reverend Jeremiah compulsively fingers the knot of his tie as he turns to Lilly and looks her in the eye. “Where do you want me, missy?”
“You okay with bringing up the rear?”
“Absolutely.” He lays a hand on the top of the enormous steel crucifix on his hip, as big as a baseball bat. On closer examination, Lilly can see that the thing has been sharpened on the end—perhaps on a whetstone or sharpening wheel—where Christ’s feet are nailed. “If we encounter a stray,” Jeremiah says wearily, without pleasure, “I will administer the old rugged cross to it without making too much noise.”
“Fair enough.” She takes one last look through the gap in the boarded window. The intersection has completely cleared. Only a few wadded pieces of trash blow across the pavement. The manhole cover is clearly visible a hundred feet away. “Okay, folks, on my signal I want everybody to walk quickly—do not run—walk quietly and quickly across the street to the sewer entrance.” She glances over her shoulder at all the pinched, feverish, terrified faces. “Y’all can do this. I know you can.”
“Listen to the lady,” Jeremiah urges. “God is with us, brothers and sisters, yea though we walk through the valley … our Lord and Savior walks beside us.”
A few scattered amens.
Lilly nervously fingers the grips of her empty Rugers and looks at Brother Stephen, who clutches his shotgun as though it were a ripcord on a parachute. “Stephen … on three, I want you to very quietly push the door open. You understand?”
He nods furiously.
“One, two … three!”
* * *
The sound of their footsteps—fifteen pairs of feet charging across a hundred feet of wasted cement, each person huffing and puffing, weighed down by a heavy knapsack—would normally draw the attention of every human and walker alike within a half-mile radius. But at the moment, the noise of this sudden exodus from the chapel is drowned out by the wave of garbled moaning and snarling emanating from the horde, which has now drifted a block or so away, drawn to the booming noises issuing out of the ground. Lilly runs out in front of the church group, her gaze fixed on the manhole cover dead ahead. The closer she gets to it, the more she becomes convinced it’s moving. Like an enormous bottle cap opening, the seal on one side has broken, a gap forming, a face visible in the maw of shadows beneath it.
“Watch out!” Bob’s leathery features peer out from the opening, his square head silhouetted by a beam of flashlight. “Straggler! Behind you!”
Just as Lilly reaches the manhole, she glances over her shoulder and sees Reverend Jeremiah lagging behind the group, lashing out with his sacred bludgeon at a dark figure lurching toward him. The large female in ratty dungarees has pounced at precisely the same moment the sharpened end of the Savior’s bound feet strikes the creature’s temple, hacking through a huge portion of its skull and half its rotting brain, sending a loopy segment of tissue flying through the air on a cushion of blood-mist.
“KEEP MOVING, BROTHERS AND SISTERS!” the preacher calls out as he staggers after the group.
Meanwhile Bob has pushed the manhole cover all the way off and has begun to help the congregants—older women first, then younger women, then men—down into the dank, shadowy bosom of safety. Lilly is second to last to plunge down the hole, followed closely by the well-dressed minister. Once Jeremiah has plummeted out of sight, Bob pulls the cover back over the opening. The dull metallic thud rings through the darkness of the tunnel, drowned out by the ringing in Lilly’s left ear as she lands on the small of her back on the floor, and sees stars.
The sudden lack of daylight and clean oxygen is jarring—it feels to Lilly as though she has just plunged underwater—the air so fetid and damp and greasy it feels like a membrane over her face. She brushes herself off and levers herself to her feet.
“Brother Jeremiah!” Reese Lee Hawthorne stands a few feet away, wringing his hands, beaming at his mentor and father figure, trying to play it cool, trying to hide his tears and be the macho Christian soldier. He swallows his emotion. “Thank the Lord you’re all right!”
Jeremiah starts to reply when, all at once, the younger man loses his cool and lurches toward Jeremiah and practically collapses into the older man’s arms in a swoon. “Thank God, thank God, thank God … you’re okay,” Reese murmurs, burying his face in the preacher’s coat. “I prayed every chance I got that you’d make it out of there.”
“My brave, brave young scout,” Jeremiah mutters, taken aback by Reese’s unexpected display of emotion. He shoves the massive cross back down into its sheath and returns the embrace, patting the young man between the shoulder blades with the tenderness of a long-lost father reunited with a son. “You done good, Reese.”
“I thought for sure we’d lost y’all,” Reese says softly into the threadbare fabric of Jeremiah’s coat.
“I’m still standing, son. We’re all still here by the grace of God and these good people. Wasn’t our time yet.”
The preacher gives a nod to Lilly and the others, as the rest of the church group gathers behind Lilly, brushing themselves off and checking their belongings. Everybody is still breathless and jittery from their mass exodus across the street, some of them looking around the narrow tunnel as they catch their breath, getting acclimated to the drastically different atmosphere down here. They managed to convey an impressive amount of cargo in their overstuffed backpacks and knapsacks, and now they stand roughly two abreast, the tunnel too narrow for them to huddle in one place. There are half a dozen women of ages ranging from teens to sixties, a single black man, and men in various states of agitation and physical fitness, and they all face Jeremiah and Lilly, as the two leaders begin to make introductions with the aplomb of chieftains, Lilly motioning to Bob Stookey first, introducing him as the brains behind this tunnel.
“Good to meet you, Reverend,” Bob says to the man in the suit.
“Call me Jeremiah,” the preacher says, returning Bob’s handshake with a twinkle in his eye. “Or Brother Jeremiah—or just Brother—like the Good Samaritan of yore.”
“Sounds good.” Bob gives the man a look. Lilly sees it from across the tunnel—it’s subtle, and it’s missed by everybody else in the shadows of that passageway, but Lilly makes note of it in the back of her mind. She can tell immediately that Bob doesn’t like this guy. Bob plasters a smile on his grizzled features. “You can call me whatever you want, just don’t call me Pops.” He looks pointedly at Matthew, who merely smiles.
Jeremiah returns Bob’s gaze with a faint smile and flicker of something in his eye. Lilly wonders if she’s watching some kind of chemical reaction between these two old lions.
While all this is going on—most of the members of the church group still catching their breath and checking their gear and gazing around the tight quarters—the faint noise emanating from the shadows five hundred feet down the passageway is missed by everyone.
At first, the noise is so soft as to be almost inaudible, but if anyone strained an ear, he or she would hear the faintest sound of cracking. Initially very muffled, watery, and indistinct—like the rending of a gr
een branch—it drifts down the tunnel in the darkness, unheard, unheeded, unnoticed … until it reaches Speed’s ears.
Speed stands at a point in the tunnel that’s almost completely engulfed in darkness, about fifty feet away from Lilly, the closest person to the source of the cracking noises, which now rise in fits and starts, as though a great pressure is being applied to a stubborn root. For the last few minutes Speed has been checking his ammo mags, counting out his remaining rounds, but now he becomes very still, listening to the noise. “Hey,” he whispers to Matthew, who kneels nearby, digging through his pack, looking for something. Speed tries to stay calm. “You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Ssshhh … listen.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Keep listening.”
Now the noises rise to the point that a few of the others—David, Ben, the plump lady in Capri pants—begin to turn toward the cracking sounds, cocking their heads in consternation. The noise has grown to the point of bringing to mind a sailing vessel creaking in a storm or a massive tree slowly keeling over—that deep, rending crack that makes a person’s flesh crawl—and it rises and rises until the others pause in their conversations.
By the time Speed realizes the source of the sound, it’s too late.
* * *
It happens in what seems like slow motion, although Lilly isn’t sure whether it’s actually occurring with syrupy slowness or it’s simply her state of shock: Hundreds of feet away, in the dark, around a bend, out of sight, at the point the shovel had augured its hole in the tunnel roof, weakening the structure’s integrity, the ceiling has begun to collapse from the weight of the herd aboveground.
As the tunnel reverberates with the horrific noise—rotting bodies plummeting down through cascading earth, a sound so alien it’s like subterranean thunder—Lilly backs away instinctively. She clenches her teeth and reaches for her guns, although she knows deep down—as all those around her know deep down in the fiber of their beings as they back away from the noise—that they have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. One of the church people—the fat lady named Rose, who is also backing away—starts keening, “No no no no no nononononono…”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 16