The first thing they see is a mushroom cloud of dust curling around the bend in the tunnel, punching through the air with the force of a battering ram, coming toward them in the darkness like a tidal wave. Several people have their flashlight beams trained on the thing, and the surreal quality of that flickering light reflecting off the moving dust storm is dizzying.
At this point, no one has turned away or started to flee, as everybody is still in that stunned, paralytic terror of registering the implications of this dark nebula rolling toward them. The thunderous noise emanating from behind the dust cloud continues unabated as more and more walkers plunge into the tunnel. Lilly can’t tear her gaze from that dust wave as it closes in.
Bob’s voice cuts through her trance. “Okay, all the folks with firearms out front!”
“Bob, we can’t take this many on!” Lilly’s hands instinctively clutch the grips of her Rugers. “There’s too—!”
“We got no choice!”
“There’s too many of them!”
“How do you know how many there are? We don’t even know how big the—!”
Bob falls silent. The others freeze in their tracks. Lilly stares.
It takes only a fleeting moment for her eyes to register what she’s seeing, and another nanosecond for that visual information to zap across her brain and travel through her cortex and down into the rest of her body where it spikes her heartbeat and makes her mouth go dry and rages through her tendons with the brushfire of fight or flight.
Reverend Jeremiah pushes his way between Speed and Matthew, and then walks slowly to the front of the group. The preacher stands next to Lilly, and at first Lilly doesn’t hear the man’s hushed voice as he mutters, “And there was war in heaven, and Michael and his angels fought valiantly against the dragon…”
A hundred feet away, the rolling cloud of dust has abruptly dissipated, and from the nucleus of the dust, like phantoms birthing themselves from the ether, a column of undead has begun to emerge, shuffling practically shoulder to shoulder, some of them clumsily brushing the earthen walls of the tunnel. More and more of them materialize in the flickering coins of flashlights, a ghastly clown car issuing innumerable clowns, the rank and file of moving corpses extending so far back into the darkness their number is incalculable.
They keep coming and coming … until Lilly’s simple prescriptive shout is the only thing tethering the living inhabitants of the tunnel to reality.
“FUCK THIS!” Her voice has gone high and thin, the voice of the primal Lilly—the teenage, fucked-up, wild-ass Lilly Caul.
“RRRRUNNNN!”
* * *
All at once, they’re running—either single file or side by side—a group of twenty souls now. Some of them stumble but somehow manage to stay on their feet, others sideswipe the scabrous walls of the narrow tunnel, letting out yelps of pain, tripping and falling, quickly lifting themselves back up (or allowing themselves to be hoisted up by one of the stronger members of the group such as Speed, Matthew, or Ben, and then continuing headlong in the darkness. A few of them peel off from the group and try to scurry up the service ladder and escape through the manhole cover at the corner of Eighteenth and Maple Streets, but Lilly quickly intercedes, yanking them back down the steps, rebuking them as she urges them onward down the south branch of the tunnel, breathlessly explaining that there’s not enough time to get everybody out of the manhole, and besides, the town is overrun with walkers and there’s no place to hide, and they’ll just end up getting pinned down again. Nobody knows how far the tunnel extends to the south. Miles? Hundreds of feet? For that matter, nobody knows exactly where the tunnel is leading them, but such considerations are secondary now to the simple imperative of evading this hideous rolling tide. The herd is moving slowly yet relentlessly as it shambles and lumbers after the smell of humans, the stench of the dead as well as the dust kicked up by the collective shuffling of lifeless feet permeating the air. Soon, each and every one of the fleeing humans begins coughing convulsively as they run—their pace, which started as a full-bore sprint, now reduced to a wounded, gimpy jog. They find themselves turning another corner, hacking and wheezing in the airless darkness—only a few of them armed with flashlights to illuminate the path in front of them—when all at once the two people in the lead suddenly scuttle to a stop. Some of the runners behind them stumble into each other, a domino effect that sends a few of them sprawling to the floor, while others brace themselves against the tunnel wall, and soon the entire group of twenty people has collectively frozen in the shadows, staring at the same thing the two people in the lead are now gaping at a mere twenty-five feet away in the darkness.
“Oh, fuck me,” Lilly utters without even being aware of her own voice as one of the flashlight beams slowly sweeps the width of a brick wall forming a dead end.
FOURTEEN
At Georgia Tech, Lilly once wrote a paper for Psych 203 called “The Mother of Invention,” which was a scholarly study of how the snap judgments of people in stressful situations—cops, soldiers, paramedics—often led to ingenious solutions, which occasionally become standard operating procedure in places like emergency rooms and modern battlefields. “It is an undeniable fact of all human existence,” the young Lilly Caul wrote in her typically hyperbolic nineteen-year-old style, “that all great inventions of the human imagination are totally pumped up and enhanced by life-and-death situations.” Sadly, over the course of the last two years, Lilly has learned that this concept does not necessarily hold true in the hellish pressure cooker of the plague. Over and over again, she has seen people walk directly into traps, lose all common sense amid swarms of walkers, make deadly mistakes, and generally become either sheep or monstrous versions of their true selves in the name of survival. But Lilly has also noticed that she may very well possess a kernel of prodigious skill in this area—turning catastrophe into creative solutions—which calms her in times of great peril. In fact, she feels this odd, nameless sensation right at this moment as the dead-end wall registers from person to person behind her in a series of hushed moans and shocked gasps.
“We were doing so goddamn good,” Matthew opines next to her.
Bob turns away from the wall and snaps the hammer back on his Magnum. In the darkness, his eyes gleam with tension. “I got two speed loaders.” He tosses a look at Ben. “How many mags you got left?”
“Two left, ten rounds each.” A pearl of sweat drops off the end of Ben’s nose. “Ain’t much to speak of, situation like this.”
“Wait a second, hold on,” Lilly says, but right at that moment, nobody hears her. People are frantically loading and cocking their weapons. Some are crying softly, praying to themselves. Everybody is hyperaware of the churning sounds of the swarm coming toward them—unseen at the moment, coming from around the last bend in the passageway, about seventy-five feet away—a grinding, gnashing sound. The walkers’ ETA is a minute or two at the most.
Out of the corner of her eye, Lilly sees the Reverend Jeremiah reaching for his tarnished steel cross, and soon he is moving toward the distant bend in the tunnel while softly praying. What Lilly can’t see is the strange look on the preacher’s face.
“What else we got in the way of firepower?” Bob is asking the group as a whole.
“Got about a dozen shells of deer shot left,” the young man with the shotgun announces.
“We’ll never hold them off!” a younger woman in a faded gingham pinafore wails. “It’s our time—and it’s not fair! Not like this!”
“Shut up, Mary Jean!” Sister Rose in her Capri pants has transitioned from sobbing to shrieking. “JUST STOP IT. STOP IT!”
David puts a hand on the fat woman’s shoulder. “It’s okay, sweetheart, we’ll figure something out.”
Bob turns to Matthew. “How about you and Speed get between us and the herd?”
“I’m low on rounds, man,” Matthew warns. “Not gonna be able to hold them off long.”
Bob nods. “Gonna have to resort to whatever blade
s, picks, and axes we got up our sleeves.”
“Wait, wait … hold on.” Lilly has an idea. It just materializes in her brain like a bubble popping. She moves toward the front of the group, shoving her way through the praying, sobbing congregants, moving in the direction from which they have just come, gazing up at the fingers of roots and icicles of limestone hanging down.
Ahead of her, Reverend Jeremiah has lowered himself to one knee, head bowed, softly praying. The wave of upright cadavers closes in, maybe less than a minute away. Lilly nearly chokes on the smell as she approaches the kneeling preacher. She still can’t make out the strangely out-of-place expression on the man’s face. But she can’t think about that now; she’s too focused on the task at hand and the process of turning disaster into inspiration.
She pauses and gazes up at the ceiling. In her mind’s eye she sees the vectors of the tunnel—the load-bearing beams, the intermittent points of egress, the weak spots, the aging timbers, the worm-eaten supports—and all the noise around her disappears. The praying, the approaching rumble of the swarm, the pathetic sobbing noises, the sound of Bob preparing the shooters, the yelling, the shrieking, the arguing—all of it fades away in Lilly’s ringing ears into the white noise of inspiration. She finally sees the stroke of luck for which she was hunting.
“Bob!” She spins toward the others. “Right up there!” Lilly points at the ceiling about thirty feet away from her. “See the broken beam?”
Bob holds his hand up to quiet the others. “EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP!”
Lilly and Bob make eye contact. The two old friends—who have been known to finish each other’s sentences, read each other’s minds, and share nonverbal communication of all sorts—now lock gazes. Lilly doesn’t even have to say it. Bob knows. He can tell what she’s thinking. “That beam is weak, Bob,” she says. “Can you see it?”
Bob nods. He nods very slowly at first. Then his eyes widen, and he quickly turns to the others. “Speed! Ben! Matt! Everybody with a bullet left in his gun! FORGET THE WALKERS! YOU HEAR ME?”
For a brief moment, frantic, vexed glances are exchanged among the men with firearms.
“HEY!”
Lilly’s booming shout wakes them up. She stands about fifty feet away from them, drawing both her empty Rugers. She aims at the ceiling as if to demonstrate what she wants. “EVERYBODY FIRE INTO THAT BEAM! ON MY SIGNAL! SEE IT?”
Bob shines his flashlight up at the rotten timber crisscrossing the roots and tongues of calcium. The sounds of bolts clanging fill the darkness. Lilly shoves her guns back into their holsters, and then points up at the cross brace. She sucks in a breath. She can hear the leading edge of the walker tsunami approaching, the odor of rancid proteins overwhelming. She screams, “NOW!”
The tunnel lights up with the fury of half a dozen firearms—muzzles flaring magnesium silver in the darkness—the collective roar drowning all other sound.
Everybody blasts away at the general vicinity of the cross brace, and the barrage gobbles through the rotten timbers with the efficiency of a chain saw, the splinters and dust flying in all directions, filling the darkness with a snowstorm of particulates, until the other members of the group begin to cough and back away and hold hands over their mouths. At last, the guns run dry—and the roof begins to cave in.
The enormous creaking noise makes everybody jerk back with a start, the swarm of walkers closing in, their silhouettes looming in the errant beams of flashlights. Their ghastly stench engulfs the tunnel, and their vocalizing rises to the point of a vast out-of-tune symphony swelling in the enclosed space, and Lilly backs against the wall, gaping at the spectacle, unable to tear her gaze from the ceiling as it begins to collapse directly on the front row of walking dead. Five or six of the creatures pause stupidly to look upward as the dirt sifts down on them and then begins to rain down in a torrent of earth and dust and shafts of celestial light slicing through the swirling haze like spindrifts.
People scatter. Lilly grabs the preacher by the collar and pulls him backward. Others dive for cover around the bend, some of them falling to the floor and covering their heads, while a few hobble quickly off into the deeper shadows. Bob shoves Ben away from the cave-in at the last possible moment as the ceiling comes down in a thunderhead of dust, the noise like a three-hundred-foot clipper ship wrenching apart in a storm. For a moment, Lilly closes her eyes and buries her face in the dirt floor as the tunnel becomes a thick undulating cloud.
Oddly, in those briefest of moments before Lilly closes her eyes as the ceiling comes down—just a single millisecond of time—she registers the blurry, indistinct image of a face in her periphery. The preacher Jeremiah has ducked down beside her, only inches away, covering the top of his head, the side of his face pressed against the floor. But in that soupçon of time that it takes the sight of his face to register in her brain, she realizes something strange and unexpected, something that, at first, simply does not compute, and will not make much sense for quite a while.
The man is smiling beatifically.
* * *
The dust clears moments later, and it takes another minute or so for Lilly to realize the sun is shining down on her. The chatter of crickets and birds comes from somewhere overhead, and the noise braces Lilly as she struggles to sit up with her back against the tunnel wall, blinking against the harsh daylight. She breathes in the clean air and smells pine—she hadn’t noticed the scent of trees when she emerged from the passageways earlier—and now in her peripheral vision she sees the silhouettes of others rising to their feet in the nimbus of dust still flooding the breached tunnel. Lilly stands up. Next to her, Jeremiah brushes off his filthy suit coat and trousers, adjusts his tie, and gazes sadly at the sloping drift of earth before them.
“Poor wretched beasts,” he mutters, almost speaking to himself, as he stares at the wall of dirt formed by the cave-in, the dust still clearing. “Certainly deserve a less ignominious death than this.”
As the haze dissipates, Lilly sees five walkers sticking out of the massive pile of earth. They look like marionettes being operated by a psychotic puppeteer—their heads shuddering up and down, their blackened mouths working, their diode-white eyes bulging, tragically clueless—and they make the most disturbing noise. Their snarling, spitting growls have been reduced to a chorus of crumbling moans, the mewling of skinned cats, warbly and almost falsetto.
“All of God’s creatures deserve deliverance,” the preacher murmurs as he strides over to the cave-in, pulling the massive crucifix from its sheath. He pauses in front of the sloping cairn of dirt, some of the walkers reaching impotently for him, biting at the air. Jeremiah glances over his shoulder. “Rose, Mary Jean, Noelle … I’m gonna need y’all to turn away for just a second now.”
Lilly notices the others have all risen to their feet, gathering in the pool of ashen daylight, looking on, silently transfixed by the cave-in, their matted hair tossing in the breeze. Bob, David, Ben, and Speed stand directly behind Lilly, and Bob mumbles something inaudible—but slightly skeptical—under his breath. The rest of the faces turn away, as if out of respect, as the preacher nods and turns back to his solemn task.
He gets the job done quickly. Each blow comes down hard and decisively, the sharpened end of the crucifix splitting the center of each rotting skull, letting out a bubbling cauldron of noxious gasses and cerebrospinal fluids as creature after creature flops forward, ruined head lolling with finality. The whole process takes only a minute. But that minute is both fascinating and troubling for Lilly.
* * *
After the last walker has been put down, they begin the process of climbing out of the tunnel. Bob goes first, scuttling up the forty-five-degree slope of loose earth with his .357 at the ready, Speed and Matthew coming up right behind him, their assault rifles locked and loaded. When they get to the top of the cave-in and peer over the mound of loose earth, they see at least a dozen creatures aimlessly wandering the desolate streets and boarded storefronts of Carlinville.
&
nbsp; Among them, the three men have enough ammo to pick off the errant walkers one by one—the creatures going down in distant puffs of blood-mist and flopping limbs—and Bob even manages to conserve a few rounds for the long journey home. When he’s satisfied that the outskirts are clear enough to convey all twenty people, he starts bringing people up from the tunnel one at a time.
It takes forever to get all the elder members of the church group—as well as the group’s sizable collection of bulging knapsacks—out of the trench and across the patchwork of vacant lots and access roads. Bob has to stay on top of the older ones like an overworked sheepherder.
When everybody is safely hidden within the cover of the forest, Bob takes them single file down a narrow path. Lilly and Jeremiah bring up the rear. Bob can hear them talking—he can’t make out what they’re saying—and it bothers him. This preacher makes Bob nervous. He tries to put it out of his mind and focus on the journey, with Matthew and Speed striding alongside him, their assault rifles cradled high against their burly chests.
They remind Bob of those Delta Force types who used to patrol the streets of Kuwait City. Those Special Forces douche bags used to push Bob around, pull rank on him all the time—and don’t even get Bob started on how they treated the indigenous personnel—but secretly Bob was glad they were there. Just like now. Speed with his rhino neck and steroidal muscles, and Matthew with his gnarled biceps and barrel-chested laborer’s physique, they can be a huge pain in the behind, and half the time they seem like they’re on something, weed or pills, but regardless, Bob is still glad that they’re on his side.
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 17