The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  Bob has a strong feeling that, sooner or later, he’s going to need them.

  * * *

  They head north through the wooded hills of Upson County, following an old footpath that runs between the tobacco farms and old defunct cotton fields. Once upon a time you couldn’t throw a rock down here without hitting a plantation. And as far as Bob knows, this very trail could have been a legacy of the Underground Railroad—now overgrown at points with jungles of sumac, kudzu, and boxwoods—which would be highly apropos considering the mission they are on. Bob uses his survey map and visual landmarks to keep them on course.

  At certain points, the path winds up the sides of hills, giving the group an unimpeded view of the Crest Highway on one side and the serpentine tributaries of Elkins Creek on the other. From this vantage point, the stream looks like a ribbon of tinsel weaving through the neglected cotton fields, and the scattered silhouettes of walkers—from this height as tiny and busy as cockroaches—seem to be everywhere, infesting the ruins of old barns, scuttling along deserted roads, treading through the stalks of overgrown farm fields, and hunkering here and there in dry creek beds and valleys, feeding off the remains of some unfortunate human or animal.

  Thankfully the high footpath seems to be off the walkers’ radar at the moment.

  Five miles into the journey, Bob starts wondering about something. Out of the corner of his eye, he’s been catching glimpses of the preacher and Lilly at the rear of the pack, chatting idly, occasionally laughing at some irony or humorous anecdote. Bob notices the heavy duffel bag that the preacher hasn’t let out of his sight since he left the chapel. Four or five feet long, made of heavy black canvas, the thing looks as though it weighs a ton. And whatever it holds looks far more substantial than the vestments and accoutrements of a clergyman. What the hell does he have in there? Guns? Gold bullion? The Holy Grail? Or maybe he’s carrying a lifetime supply of holy water and wafers.

  Again, Bob tries to put it out of his mind and focus on the journey.

  He knows that they’ll need to turn west at a certain point and find a bridge across Elkins Creek in order to reach Woodbury by nightfall. The older people are already exhausted, despite the fact that Lilly has allowed the group three separate rest stops. Their water supplies are getting low, and they don’t have the ammunition to overcome another herd. Bob starts to get worried. The sun has started to sink behind the tree line to the west, and there’s still no sign of Highway 18 in the distance—just a continuous, unbroken chain of abandoned fields.

  It’ll be another hour before Bob will admit to the others—and himself, for that matter—that they are hopelessly, inexorably, dangerously lost.

  * * *

  “It ain’t something I ever want to live through again, I’ll tell ya that much,” the good Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz confesses in a low voice to Lilly as the twosome amble along the winding path, the late-afternoon sun blazing down on the backs of their necks. They walk slowly in order to keep enough paces between them and the rest of the church group, mostly to maintain a modicum of privacy—not that they’re saying anything illicit or have anything to hide. They simply prefer discretion at this point. “Never saw it coming,” he mutters, shaking his big handsome head. He carries his heavy black duffel on one broad shoulder, the strap digging into his suit coat. “We had done baptisms in that river a million times, brought countless of our brothers and sisters to Christ…”

  He pauses and looks down as he walks. Lilly sees the tears in his eyes.

  Jeremiah continues. “I thought it was fish at first, we get catfish down there sometimes the size of Dobermans, but when the water started stirring up, and that poor, poor woman from Hastings got snagged…”

  Again he stops, adjusting the shoulder strap, and a single tear tracks across the cleft in his prominent chin. Lilly looks away and remains silent out of respect.

  “Anyway, with that said, it would be a blessing to settle somewhere.” He looks at Lilly. “Somewhere safe, with good folks like yourself.” He looks thoughtfully at the backs of his flock, the slumped shoulders and sunburned baldpates of the older congregants as they trudge dutifully along, following Bob up the winding path. “These poor folks have been through hell,” Jeremiah says. “They seen things that no decent person should ever have to see.” For a moment he gazes off at the horizon as though searching some hidden part of his memory. “One thing this here plague has taught all of us—believers and nonbelievers alike—and that’s the immutable fact that there are things could happen to a soul that are much, much worse than dying.” He pauses, then looks back at Lilly, his eyes clearing. “What am I saying? You’ve probably seen things I can’t even imagine.”

  Lilly shrugs as she walks. “I guess you start to get numb to it. I don’t know.” She thinks about it. “It still gets to me, though.” She thinks some more. “I guess I should be thankful for that.”

  He looks at her without breaking stride. “Whaddaya mean, thankful?”

  She shrugs again. “Thankful that I haven’t become completely dead inside … that I still have the ability to be shocked.”

  “That’s because you’re a good soul—a natural-born good person—I can tell. I know we just met, but you can just tell with some folks.”

  Lilly smiles. “Spend a little time with me and you’ll change your mind.”

  He chuckles. “I doubt that.” The wind buffets the flap of his suit coat open, exposing the top of the crucifix sheathed on his belt. He rests his hand on it. “But you know, you’re right about one thing. No matter who you are, you lose a little bit of your soul every time you gotta put one of them wretched creatures outta its misery.”

  Lilly offers no response. They walk a little bit farther in silence. At last, Lilly glances at the top of the crucifix visible inside his coat. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Shoot.”

  “What’s with the crucifix?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Lilly smiles. “It’s not exactly standard equipment for a minister.”

  He lets out a sigh. “True … but there ain’t much of anything in this world that’s standard anymore.”

  “True. But isn’t it—I don’t know—a little sacrilegious using a cross for cracking open heads? Bet there’s an interesting story there.”

  He looks at her. “There’s a story, all right, but it ain’t all that interesting.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Lilly says with a grin, realizing once again that she might as well face the fact that she kind of likes this guy. God help her, she kind of trusts him.

  “Couple years ago,” he says, “right around the time the whole mess broke out, I was down to Slidell, Louisiana, visiting friends. There was an old Catholic church down there—went all the way back to Lewis and Clark—the minister there was an old friend, and he got bit real bad. I came as soon as I found out, and I found him in the sanctuary, on the floor near the altar, on his last legs. Hadn’t turned yet, but you could just tell he was going over any second. He held my hand and he asked me…” He pauses, looks down, licking his lips. Lilly can tell this is hard for him, but she just keeps silently walking alongside him and patiently waiting for him to complete the thought. “He asked me to do him in,” Jeremiah finally murmurs in a lower register. “I pulled my pea shooter, but he stopped me. And then something very strange happened. With every last ounce of strength he had in him … he pointed up to the big old cross above the altar. I knew immediately what he meant. I don’t know how I knew, but I just did.”

  Another pause. Lilly waits for a second, and then she asks him what happened.

  “I administered the last rites best I knew them. I found a font of holy water and I apologized for not knowing any of the Latin, but I anointed him and took his confession. He was happy it was me with him in those last minutes. I could tell. Better some old Pentecostal yay-hoo from your backyard sending you off than some stranger in a hospital or some deacon out in the field. Anyway, after that, I did what comes naturally
when you see them eyes going yellow like fish eyes … and you see them teeth showing. I bashed his head in. Lost my mind a little, I guess. I think I passed out. When I woke up there was some of them creatures in the sanctuary with me, and they was coming for me, and I went a little haywire. Couldn’t find my pistol. All I had was this old cross. I took them down one at a time with the thing, and afterward I saw it gleaming in the votive light and I guess I reckoned that was some kind of a sign. Basically, that’s how it all came about.”

  Lilly nods. “Makes sense to me.”

  “I made a few modifications to the thing,” he says. “I don’t think the Good Lord would mind too much that I’ve defaced the image of his only Son, this day and age. Serves me well in tight quarters.”

  Lilly lets out a little nervous chuckle. “Have to admit, you’re pretty handy with—”

  She stops when she notices something going on ahead of them on the trail. Apparently Bob, Speed, and Matthew have stopped on the edge of the path about fifty yards away, the people behind them coming to an abrupt stop at the sight of Bob’s hand shooting up.

  Something is wrong. Lilly can tell. She can feel it. In the elongating shadows of dusk, through the whirling dust devils of gnats, she can see Bob pointing to the north, and then to the west, and the other two men arguing with him, and David coming up to the group to put his two cents in, and then Ben getting involved.

  “What now?” Lilly says somewhat rhetorically to the preacher.

  FIFTEEN

  In the overmedicated, overdisinfected, overprotective years before the plague, nobody over the age of six ever got lost. With GPS devices in everything from cars to phones to key chains—as well as the satellites of Big Brother orbiting the earth—very few journeys were ever undertaken without the digital bread crumbs of tracking devices showing people the way home. Then came the scourge of the reanimated dead, and all around the world the grids, towers, transmitters, cell service providers, routers, cams, drones, and bugs went dark. Making matters worse was the gradual decay of the environment. Like the effects of aging on a human face, the landscape began to gray and sag and appear strangely homogenous. Old men look a lot like old women, and one rural backwater has begun to look a lot like another on an opposite side of a county. Weeds and foliage and opportunistic vines have overtaken farm fields. The weather has turned every structure into the same dilapidated pile of lumber the same shade of wormy gray. The cities have all become overgrown Chernobyls with desolate, boarded buildings swallowed in thick kudzu and brown creeping ivy. Everything has begun to look the same, which is exactly why Bob now stands on a craggy bluff overlooking the deepening shadows of the Central Georgia farmland, scratching his chin nervously as he tries to figure out where the hell they are. He looks at his survey map and then at the horizon. The snaking silver waters of Elkins Creek shimmer inscrutably in the dying light.

  “Did you check the compass?” Ben asks from the other side of the trail, where he has dropped his heavy knapsack in the dirt. His voice drips with sarcasm. “Those little gizmos have been known to come in handy when you’re lost.”

  “Put a lid on it, Ben,” Lilly says under her breath, keeping the exchange from the earshot of the others. Her heart gallops. Getting lost is not an option, and even though they see only a smattering of walkers off in the distance, on the edges of the desolate bean fields and down in the troughs of dry streambeds, they don’t have the resources to spend even one additional night in the wild. “Bob, did we cross Highway Eighteen by mistake?”

  “I don’t know,” he says with a sigh. “Compass says we’re heading northwest, but I’ll be damned if I can tell how far north we are.” By this point, the rest of the church group has gathered around. Jeremiah comes up behind Lilly and slides the enormous duffel bag off his shoulder, setting it down carefully with a weary sigh. The muffled sound of something clinking in the bag gets Lilly’s attention for a moment. What the fuck does he have in there? Cases of booze? Sacramental wine? She turns back to Bob and sees him running fingers through his greasy graying hair, squinting into the setting sun, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening to the point of looking like braided leather. He looks at her. “Only thing I can tell you for sure is we should have reached the River Cove overpass by now.”

  “We’re too far north,” Lilly says gravely.

  “Thank you, Sherlock,” Ben wisecracks.

  David shakes his head. “Ben, are you just naturally an asshole, or do you work at it?”

  Ben grins, maybe for the first time since they left Woodbury. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”

  “Everybody, just shut up for a second and let me think,” Bob says, the survey map open to Meriwether County. Lilly watches him trace the winding tributary of Elkins Creek with a grubby fingernail, when the sound of Matthew’s voice tugs at her attention.

  “Lilly?”

  Lilly looks up from the map and sees Matthew and Speed standing side by side behind her, each man looking a bit hangdog, sheepish, maybe even a little anxious. Each holds an assault rifle high on his chest. Matthew says, “Can I suggest something?”

  “Go ahead, Matthew.”

  “The thing is, Speed and I have been scouting this territory for weeks now. Maybe we could go take a quick look-see while the group rests, maybe we’ll find a landmark or something.”

  Lilly thinks about it. “All right, if you make it snappy. We don’t want to be out in the open when darkness rolls in. I’ll go with you.”

  Matthew and Speed exchange a glance, and Matthew scratches his lower lip awkwardly, indecisively. “Um … we can handle this on our own, you don’t have to—”

  “I’m going and that’s the end of it. Come on, we’re losing daylight.”

  A huge sigh from Matthew. “All right, whatever.”

  Lilly looks at Bob. “If something happens, and we’re not back in half an hour, get these people somewhere safe, or at least safer than standing out here in the open on this fucking footpath.”

  “Will do,” Bob says.

  Lilly turns to the others and speaks up so the people in the back can hear her. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to take a small scouting party out, get the lay of the land before we go any farther.”

  The big woman in Capri pants steps forward. “Y’all are lost, ain’t ya?”

  * * *

  It takes the three of them less than ten minutes to reach the bottom of the wooded hills and start following Elkins Creek south. Matthew takes the lead, with Lilly on his heels, and Speed bringing up the rear with his assault rifle in the ready position, the stock braced on his shoulder commando-style. They traverse at least a quarter mile in this fashion, eyes wide and alert for walkers, sensory organs heightened by the light and space of the farmland. Speed has never been trained in paramilitary protocol or even the most rudimentary handling of firearms. Everything he knows about weaponry he learned from playing video games. But he knows one thing for sure—one indisputable, unassailable, undeniable fact—and it fills his nostrils now as they cross the rocky, matted earth of an arid riverbed and plunge into the thickets of an overgrown tobacco field.

  “Matt! You smell that?” Speed breathes in the musky, herby scent permeating the breeze. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s getting stronger!”

  About thirty feet ahead of him, walking a few paces in front of Lilly, Matthew cuts a swath through the gigantic tobacco leaves with his muscular tradesman’s body. He holds his AR-15 against his collarbone, cradled stiffly in his sinewy arms. He reminds Speed of an enormous grizzly on the scent, closing in on a school of trout.

  Matthew knows this smell as well as Speed—the telltale sour sage funk that gets into one’s drapes and the carpets of one’s car and can even invade the fibers of an empty pocket or a ziplock when the cops come sniffing around. To many, it’s a fragrance as convivial as that of freshly baked cookies, as sensual as an ocean breeze, as seductive as expensive perfume warmed by the body heat of a beautiful woman. Right at this moment, in fact, even Lilly ca
n detect a familiar odor.

  “Is that—?” Lilly pauses and glances over her shoulder at Speed weaving through the stalks and leaves. “That smell, that’s not—”

  “Yes, Lilly, it is indeed,” Matthew says with the kind of reverence one reserves for finding the largest truffle in the forest or the biggest golden nugget in the mountain stream or the one holy chalice used by Christ. He lowers his gun and pauses amid the tobacco plants. The sea of enormous kelly-green leaves talk in the breeze, making hollow bongo-slap sounds that drift up into the humid, hazy clouds.

  “You guys been holding out on me?” Lilly says to Matthew with a crooked smile. She would never consider herself a stoner, but she used to imbibe on a regular basis with her friend Megan to the point of missing it in the morning if she couldn’t have a toke with her first cup of coffee. When the plague broke out, she found herself wanting it more and more to take the edge off, but scoring a bag of weed in these times was easier said than done.

  “We were going to share it,” Speed assures her with a forced smile as he joins them in a narrow clearing surrounded by a wall of green at least six feet high. The smell of marijuana is so redolent now—mingling with the odors of black earth and decay—that Lilly feels like she’s getting a contact buzz.

  “In terms of direction,” Matthew says, standing on the toes of his jackboots, trying to see over the tops of flowering tobacco swaying in the wind. The buffeting drumming noise of the leaves nearly drowns out his voice. “I’m thinking the stash is that way … Speed-O, your thoughts?”

  Speed peers over the stalks. “Yeah, definitely, I can see the trees. See ’em?”

  “Yep.” Matthew looks at Lilly. “Just inside that little grouping of oak trees to the west? See them? There’s a plot of land right there, smack-dab in the middle of the tobacco, where somebody was growing the sweetest bud this side of fucking Humboldt County.”

  Lilly gazes at the trees. “Okay, so I assume this means you know where we are?”