Matthew exchanges a grin with Speed, then turns the grin on Lilly.
* * *
“Walk toward the smell, folks,” Matthew instructs as he and Speed usher the group down a winding path that skirts the edge of the tobacco fields.
Bob and Lilly bring up the rear, giving each other loaded glances.
A few minutes ago, Lilly had allowed the two young men to harvest a few ounces before returning to the group, and now she has to struggle to keep from grinning. She saw them sneaking a few tokes before taking their places at the edge of the bluff like a stoned Lewis and Clark. Now they’re leading the ragtag group with suspiciously grandiose bearings.
The woman in Capri pants frowns as she sniffs the air with the curiosity of a bloodhound. “Is that skunk?”
“Skunk weed, is more like it,” Bob mumbles under his breath.
Lilly stifles her laughter. “I think it’s a family of possums.”
Bob coughs to disguise his chuckling. “I believe the plural of possum is possum.”
One of the other church members murmurs, “Never smelled no possum like that.”
The preacher appears to be wise to the ruse. He smiles as he lopes along with his flock, making Lilly wonder if he has imbibed in the herb himself. “It’s all part of God’s rich bounty, Sister Rose,” he says with a twinkle in his eye and a wink for Lilly.
* * *
They make it home before full darkness sets in, dragging with exhaustion, spent from the journey. They come from the east, bathed in the blue light of dusk, and they see the outskirts of the town long before the sentries on the east wall see them.
By this point, Lilly has the lead, and she quickens her pace when she glimpses the old ruins of the railroad depot and the burned-out shells of cars in the hazy distance. She sees the broken-down water tower with the faded letters WOO URY stenciled on the side, the boarded engine shed with its charred roof damaged by the fires earlier that month, and the ramshackle barricade with its semitrailer gate north of the shed. Her heart beats faster as she turns and signals the others.
At this very moment, as the group hastens across the wasted outer lots and closes in on the east entrance, a number of revelations strike Lilly. Chief among them is the fact that she never realized how much this place had grown on her. For all its traumatic memories, the deaths of her friends that occurred here, the loss of so many good people, and the horrific reign of the Governor, Lilly has adopted this place as her home. Or maybe it has adopted her. Who would have thought that she—the cool, hipster fashionista from Atlanta—would have come to love such a tiny, backward burg as this? More important, as she hurries toward the wall, waving at the frizzy-haired figure of Barbara on a cherry picker in the distance, Lilly realizes with some measure of chagrin that her heart is racing now for completely unexpected reasons—a powerful set of emotions, some of them contradictory to each other—that are just now bubbling to the surface.
For practically the whole time she’s been away on this rescue mission—intermittently and yet sometimes at the oddest moments—she has been thinking about Calvin Dupree. Half-formed images have been flickering in the back of Lilly’s mind from that night she almost kissed him. For some reason she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about his scent—that soapy combination of Old Spice and chewing gum—and the clear, deep, knowing look in his eyes. For the entire trip Lilly has been continually aware of the delicate chain with the tiny cross around her neck that Calvin gave her. If they had gone ahead and kissed that night in front of the courthouse, Lilly probably wouldn’t have been thinking about that moment so longingly, so compulsively, so obsessively. But that moment now looms so large in her mind that she feels—as she closes in on the wall—like a child on Christmas morning rushing down the stairs to see what Santa has left her.
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Barbara jokes from her perch on the cherry picker, calling down to the weary travelers as they approach. “What are you doing, Lilly, pretending you’re Moses?”
David trots alongside Lilly, grinning up at his wife of thirty-seven years. “Typical! We’re not even inside the wall yet and already she’s giving us shit!”
“You look like hell, David!” Barbara gazes at the others. “Am I supposed to cook for all these people?”
“I love you, too, sweetheart!”
The engine in the semicab fires up suddenly as Bob gives a whistle.
Lilly and the others crowd around the entrance. Bob holsters his .357 and yanks a cross brace away from the gap as the truck cab rumbles, belches black fumes, and then begins to back away from the opening. Ben, Speed, and Matthew pull chains off the breach and motion to the others that it’s safe to go ahead and enter.
Reverend Jeremiah looks like a child seeing the big city for the first time, his eyes wide with awe, his gigantic duffel weighing down his shoulder as he gazes with wonder at the scorched, battle-worn, beleaguered town. He mumbles a continuous stream of Thank the Lord as he ushers his flock one at a time through the opening.
By this point, word has spread like a brushfire through Woodbury that the rescue team is back, all in one piece, and the jubilation and surprise show on the expectant faces that appear around street corners and buildings. Gloria comes rushing around the end of an adjacent semitrailer with a rifle in her hand and a huge grin on her face. Tommy Dupree comes scampering up from the speedway gardens still gripping a shovel, his face blazing with excitement. Others come out of doors and around the sides of the courthouse building with euphoric expressions on their careworn faces.
Hands are shaken, hugs proffered, introductions made—the preacher seems to be in his element, bowing, grinning at people with his million-kilowatt smile and blessing everyone within fifty yards, his charisma on high boil—and Lilly watches it all with awkward satisfaction. She keeps scanning the grounds, looking for Calvin. Where is he? She asks Tommy and the boy gives a whistle and calls out for his dad. Lilly’s pulse starts to quicken. In the distance across the square, the courthouse door bangs open, and Calvin comes scuttling down the steps in his work pants, clodhoppers, and chambray shirt, rubbing the back of his neck with a bandanna. He looks like a country gentleman, maybe a construction foreman or bachelor farmer, hurrying to work. When he sees Lilly, his face lights up.
“Look who’s here, Dad!” Tommy Dupree stands proudly next to Lilly as though he brought her back alive himself. Lilly feels the boy’s fingers brush hers for a moment, and then, very naturally, as though he’s been doing it all his life, the boy grasps her hand and holds it.
Calvin comes up and gives Lilly a chaste little hug, the kind of greeting a pair of coworkers at a cocktail party might give each other. “God, it’s good to see you.”
Lilly grins at him. “Back at ya, Calvin. You have no idea how good it is to be back.”
“Looks like it’s mission accomplished.” He makes a gesture toward all the introductions going on around them. “Pretty impressive.”
Lilly shrugs. “They would have done the same for us, believe me.”
“Barbara said they lost contact with you.”
“Walkies were out of range for a while, some of the batteries were low.”
Calvin nods. “Wasn’t the same without you around here.” He puts a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “Tommy’s turned into quite a gardener.”
The boy beams at her. “I planted the rest of them melon seeds today.”
“That’s great, Tommy. Maybe tomorrow we can start in on the tomatoes.”
The boy nods. “And when them tomatoes grow, can we make spaghetti?”
Lilly lets out a chortling laugh despite her exhaustion. “Oh, my God … what I would give for a plate of fettuccini Alfredo.”
Calvin is looking at her with an easy, natural smile, but there’s a spark of something darker behind his eyes, something more like longing. “Would you settle for some stale dry cereal and powdered milk?”
She returns his gaze. She sees the glint of desire in his eyes. It takes her breath away. She
smiles back at him. “Are you buying?”
* * *
That evening, Reverend Jeremiah makes a special point to personally introduce himself to each and every one of the twenty-two residents of Woodbury who stayed behind. Dripping with charm and exhibiting a joie de vivre that folks around these parts have not seen in a long while, he holds court in the town square long after darkness has set in and the torches have started to burn down to the nubs in doorways and windows. For hours he lingers under the crooked limbs of ancient live oaks, in the light of a fire pit, lovingly introducing the people of Woodbury to the people of his small congregation, making gentle little jokes about each member’s personality quirks. He jokes about Sister Rose in her Capri pants being the fashion icon of the group, and he ribs his eldest member, Brother Joe, for being the closest to God … literally. He teases his two college-age congregants, Brothers Stephen and Mark, for being Sunday school dropouts, and he introduces his only black congregant, a middle-aged man with a fussy little pen-line mustache named Harold Stauback, as the Voice of Valdosta, a former deejay and famous soloist from the Calgary Baptist Church choir. But for most of the evening, between sips of broth and instant tea, Brother Jeremiah profusely thanks the Woodbury people for saving the lives of his flock and giving them a second chance at survival. He pledges to work his proverbial butt off to make Woodbury safe and prosperous. He promises to be a team member and pitch in and do his part and make sure all his people do the same.
If he were running for something, he would be elected in a landslide.
“I know it’s a golden oldie of a cliché,” he says late that night, puffing a cheroot, leaning back on one of the rickety Adirondack chairs positioned around the fire pit, the dwindling flames illuminating the faces of the faithful who have remained gathered around him, “but the Good Lord does work in mysterious ways.”
“How do you mean?” Ben Buchholz asks from the other side of the pit, the flickering glow of the firelight making his weathered features look almost lupine in the darkness. Perched on a stump, smoking an unfiltered Camel, Ben has been listening intently to the preacher all night long, laughing at the man’s jokes and nodding thoughtfully at every homespun piece of wisdom that has come out of his mouth. Those who have known Ben the longest have been highly amused at this phenomenon and the speed with which the preacher has won over the town curmudgeon. Now the other dozen or so stalwart souls who have remained in the town square that night to chew the fat wait attentively for the man’s answer.
The preacher yawns. “All I mean is that we were meant to come here and be with y’all.” He smiles, and even in the darkness his Ultrabrite grin is dazzling. “This is where our destiny lies, Ben. Y’all are God’s people. I might even go as far as saying y’all are the chosen people, and we are blessed by y’all risking your lives to take us in.” He pauses to puff on his stogie. “We lost some of our people back there in Carlinville. We pray that their souls are sent home, and they rest in peace in God’s loving hands.” He looks down, and the others remain silent out of respect. Even Ben looks down out of deference to the preacher. After a moment, Jeremiah looks up at them. “I promise you one thing. We ain’t gonna take this act of kindness, mercy, and love for granted. We’re gonna earn our way here. I’m gonna roll up my sleeves and help out in any way I can. And so are my people. I can see that Lilly’s the one in charge here, so whatever she wants, she’s gonna get. We owe y’all our lives.”
He tosses his cheroot onto the smoldering embers of the fire as if punctuating his proclamation with this grand gesture.
The others soak it all in. Beside Ben, David and Barbara sit on lawn chairs, nodding pensively, a blanket over their laps. Speed and Matthew lounge on the grass behind the Sterns, absorbing everything that’s being said while passing a small pipe back and forth, pretending nobody knows that they’re imbibing in the fruits of their secret harvest. On the other side of the fire pit, Gloria sprawls sleepily on a chaise longue, nursing a plastic Solo cup of cheap wine, drifting in and out of a catlike slumber. The half dozen or so other souls relax on the ground around the preacher, hanging on his every word. Sister Rose is still there, hanging in, as is the gospel singer, Harold Stauback, now lying on the grass, propped up on one elbow as he listens. They all silently process the preacher’s magnanimous soliloquy and think about how good it is these days for two tribes of people to come together as one, to work hand in hand, to help each other, to love each other.
In fact, beyond the boundaries of that flickering firelight in the square that night, virtually every living soul in Woodbury feels the same way: that the dark days are behind them, that the future of the community has never looked brighter, and that there’s hope.
The only one taking exception to all this utopian bliss hasn’t been seen for hours.
Bob Stookey has been mostly keeping to himself since returning home from the rescue mission, and he will continue maintaining a low profile—keeping his feelings to himself—for as long as it takes to find evidence to back up his suspicions.
Then he will expose this two-bit flimflam artist who calls himself a man of God.
SIXTEEN
In the wee hours that morning, in the courthouse basement, where a modest cafeteria once served the secretarial pool and midlevel bureaucrats of the Meriwether County government, Lilly and Calvin watch Tommy snoring softly, his head on one of the big folding tables, a few empty Red Bull cans, Styrofoam bowls, empty cereal boxes, and the wadded wrappers of a half dozen Twinkies arrayed around his head like an enormous halo. An ancient sign hangs on the wall behind the boy, showing a friendly bear in a ranger hat asking all who pass to keep Meriwether County free of forest fires. For the last hour and a half, Tommy had been trying to stay up with his dad and Lilly, talking about the day’s mission and the adventures in the tunnel, until his head started nodding and lolling forward. A few minutes ago, he nearly went face-first into his Post Toasties. Calvin decided to let him doze right there while Lilly and he discussed private matters.
Now the two of them have moved to the end of the long table, and Lilly sits on the edge of the table while Calvin paces restlessly, murmuring softly, “I won’t lie to you, I had my doubts about this whole rescue mission.”
“Whaddaya mean?” She looks at him. “You mean whether we would find these people?”
“Yeah, I guess … that and whether you could even get all the way to the other side of the county in this tunnel. I could tell he was really worried, too.” Calvin indicates the slumbering teenager. “He fidgeted and worried the whole time. I tried to keep him busy in the raceway garden, but he’s been through a lot lately with his mom’s passing and all.” Calvin looks down. “He’s really sweet on you, Lilly.” Calvin looks up at her. “All the kids are.”
The briefest pause, with Lilly wanting to ask Calvin if he is sweet on her as well, but she controls the urge and just says, “I adore them.” She licks her lips. “You said it yourself, we had no choice. We had to do it. It was the right thing to do.”
“Obviously. Look at all the lives you saved. Woodbury’s gonna be stronger for it.”
“That preacher’s a character, isn’t he?”
Calvin chuckles. “He’s got the spirit in him, that’s for sure.” His smile fades. “I’ve seen a slew of men like him over the years, kind of guy who could sell an ice cream cone to an Eskimo.” He thinks about it for a moment. “Usually these guys turn out to be opportunists. You know? But this guy, he seems … different. I trust him for some reason. Don’t ask me why. He just seems like a decent human being who found his calling preaching the Word.”
Lilly smiles. “I have to say, I kind of know exactly what you’re talking about. He seems honest … sincere. Something. Can’t quite put my finger on it.”
Calvin nods. “I know. Just trust your gut, Lilly. It’s served you well up to now. It’s served us all well.”
Her smile turns bashful as she looks down. “I thank you for that, Calvin.”
Calvin chews his lip f
or a moment. “I keep telling you to call me Cal.”
“Sorry … Cal it is.” She looks at him, wanting to reach out and touch the faint shadow of whiskers on his strong chin. Her midriff flutters suddenly as he comes over and sits on the edge of the table next to her. Now she can smell that trademark scent of soap, Juicy Fruit, and Old Spice. How the hell does he manage to smell so good in this crazy age? Most people smell like wet dog fur and dried urine, but this guy smells like he’s about to go on a date. “I’ll be honest,” he says to her now in a softer voice, “I wasn’t exactly cool as a cucumber myself the past twenty-four hours.”
She looks at him. “Were you worried about me, too?”
He shrugs and grins. “Well, you know how it is. I’m a worrywart.”
A noise from the other end of the table gets their attention. Tommy Dupree stirs, lets out a little cough. Calvin puts his hand over his mouth and gives Lilly an exaggerated Oops look. She puts a finger to her lips and tries to quell her giggles. They push themselves off the table and tiptoe across the room, performing a pantomime of two bandits stealing away in the night, trying not to set off an alarm or rouse the bank guards.
They slip out the door and into the cluttered, shadowy main corridor, where a single emergency lamp glows at the end of the hall, lengthening shadows and barely illuminating a floor littered with shell casings, coils of strapping tape, and filthy puddles of muck. Plastic tarps cover the radiators, and a few of the exposed pipes in the ceiling still drip with dirty water backed up for months.
They stand against the corridor wall, facing each other, gazes locked. Calvin touches her chin lightly, mesmerized by the contours of her face. “I was worried about you,” he says with a smile. “I confess … I missed you.”
Something changes like a switch being thrown. Calvin looks into her eyes, his smile fading. Lilly’s smile fades as well, as she returns his gaze. They stare at each other for an endless moment, the water dripping every few seconds, landing between them, making plinking noises on the floor but hardly registering with either of them. Lilly feels a warm sensation in her midsection rising like a tide, her spine tingling, her flesh rashing with goose bumps. She can barely hear Calvin’s voice as he says, “Maybe we ought to go somewhere and—”
The Walking Dead: Descent Page 19