The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  * * *

  “You must never go to sleep, Luke.” The hushed whisper of a dead woman penetrates the ear of the young dreamer. “Or you’ll end up like me.”

  Lucas slaps his face in the dream and tries his hardest to wake up. He doesn’t like this dream one little bit. He wants so badly to wake up. Now. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up … WAKE UP!

  His dead mother just laughs … and laughs and laughs. Luke can’t breathe.

  Maybe he’s already dead, like his mom. Maybe they all are … his brother and sister, his dad, everybody … doomed to sleep forever.

  PART 3

  Last Rites

  Behold the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation and to destroy its sinners from it.

  —Isaiah 13:9

  TWENTY

  From the time he was still wearing Red Ball Jets sneakers on his huge feet and braces on his big overbite, Jeremiah James Garlitz has been perpetually obsessed with pleasing his daddy. Even in the years following his old man’s death—Daddy went out like a lightbulb in his Barcalounger in front of a Braves game in 1993 from a cerebral aneurism—Jeremiah has dreamed of making Master Sergeant Daniel Garlitz proud of his only child. Not a day goes by—really, not even an hour—without a memory of the old man flicking across Jeremiah’s mind screen. Over and over, the preacher casts his thoughts back to the time his daddy made him recite the books of the Bible while kneeling on broken glass in the garage of their old Victorian house in Richmond. Or the time Big Dan Garlitz locked the boy in a footlocker in the basement of their Wilmington home with nothing but a Concordance Bible and in his underwear and didn’t let the boy out until Jeremiah had shit himself and had started to scream so loudly his mother heard the noise and interceded. Today, Jeremiah looks back upon these memories with a strange kind of morbid, compulsive fascination—like a man continually picking at a scab. The memories give him a charge, an electric jolt, and make him dream of the day he will finally make Sergeant Dan truly proud.

  Which has come at last—the day of deliverance, the day of salvation—praise the Lord.

  This realization runs through the back of the preacher’s mind as he crouches in the scorched ruins of the train shed on the southwest corner of Woodbury’s barricade just before dawn that morning. He feels like a coach before a big game, a manager for Team Jesus, and he speaks softly, furtively, so as not to be heard by any nonessential resident who might be up early for whatever reason. “Remember the two stages of the ritual,” he says to the others as he draws in the dirt with a stick. He makes a big circle and labels it Woodbury, and then he draws arrows pointing inward from the four corners of the neighboring farmland. Then he puts an X in the middle of town and labels it Arena. “Stage one is communion.” He smiles, looking at the men as a father would gaze proudly at his prodigal sons. “We take the blood and the body of Christ in the square at sunset. Amen.”

  The five other men huddling around him—Reese, Mark, Stephen, Anthony, and Wade—absorb this news with great anticipation, like anxious paratroopers, their sweat-damp faces reflecting both joy and nervous tension.

  “Stage two, of course, is the summoning.” The preacher nods toward the stocky retired cop kneeling next to him. “Which will be your department, Wade.”

  The former patrolman with the Jacksonville PD smiles, intoxicated with the spirit. The ultimate offering, the definitive sacrifice—to be consumed by the very creatures that have brought about the apocalypse—will be the Pentecostal People of God’s greatest moment. “The wall shouldn’t be a problem,” Wade assures the preacher. “The only thing I’ve been wondering about is the location of the herd.”

  The preacher nods. “You’re wondering if there’s gonna be enough of them.”

  The cop nods.

  Jeremiah’s grin intensifies, a light on a rheostat. “God will bring the multitudes to us … as he brought the mountain to Mohammed.”

  Some of them answer with amen or praise Him as they exchange exultant grins.

  Jeremiah feels tears moistening his eyes. They have been waiting eagerly for this great and wonderful moment for years. They came close a few times, but local church authorities and the laws of the state of Florida got in the way. Now there is nothing that can stop them. God has paved the way for this glorious moment.

  Harold Stauback is the only member of the group who isn’t smiling. The dapper man, dressed in a threadbare golf sweater and torn khakis, stands across the shed near a pile of railroad ties, hands thrust in his pockets, chewing his lips nervously, pensively, kicking the dust at his feet. “I just wish we didn’t have to spring this on these people.” He looks up. “I’ve really grown fond of these folks.”

  Jeremiah levers himself to his feet and ambles across to where Harold is standing. “Brother, I hear you.” He touches Harold’s shoulder. “I feel the same way. I wish to God we didn’t have to be so secretive.” Then Jeremiah hugs the man. Harold sniffs as he returns the embrace. Jeremiah speaks softly into the man’s ear. “I have prayed and prayed on it, and I can’t come up with another way.” He stands back, still holding the black man’s shoulders, bracing him. “You’re a good man, Harold. You belong in heaven, not in this horrible hell on earth.” The preacher pauses, thinks about it. “You know that fella, name of Calvin? Good Christian man with the kids?” He sees Harold nodding, and he chews the inside of his cheek, thinking it over. “Why don’t you approach him later this morning, in private, just float the idea to him, see if he gets it.”

  Harold rubs his mouth, pondering the idea. “What if he tells the others? Rebels against it?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, I have a feeling about that fella.” Jeremiah turns to the others and aims his high-voltage smile at them. “Think about it. We are doing these good people a favor—the favor of a lifetime—the Christian ones will see that.” The men bow their heads, nodding, as if in tribute. Jeremiah wipes tears from his eyes. “This time tomorrow, we’ll all be in paradise.” He gazes at them through his tears. “No more walking corpses. No more walls. No more grief.” He lets out a strange and almost giddy chuckle. “No more powdered milk.”

  * * *

  The sun rises that morning at precisely five thirty-two, the exact time displayed on the old wind-up pocket watch that Bob still cherishes from his days in the army running ambulance units up and down Highway 8 between Baghdad and Kuwait City. Despite its tarnished finish, the watch is a beauty, engraved with Bob’s unit and insignia, the stem gray from all the winding over the years—the kind of timepiece his mother would have called a “turnip” watch—and now Bob keeps it handy as he crouches on the roof of Deforest Feed and Seed Company at the end of Pecan Street.

  The wind tosses Bob’s graying, oily, thinning hair across his eyes as he scans the area. With its huge soot-stained chimneys offering cover, and a scenic view of both Main Street and Woodbury’s patchwork grid of side streets, the roof is an ideal place for a lone figure to hide and keep tabs, waiting for the town to wake up and go to work. Bob can see the preacher’s brownstone a block and a half to the west, and he also has a clear view of the square, the courthouse, Lilly’s place, the farthest points of the barricade, the distant woods beyond, and most of the other significant landmarks. Bob knows it’s up to him to stop this madness. But he also realizes he has to be careful. If he doesn’t do this properly, nobody will believe him. It’s almost as though he has to deprogram the original members of the town—including Lilly—who have fallen under the spell of this flimflam artist who calls himself a man of God.

  Bob checks his .357, which sits on the tar-paper roof next to his canteen. He has used the Magnum for years now for everything from shooting raccoons to putting down walkers. The revolver has served him well, despite the fact that it holds only seven rounds—six in the cartridge and one in the breach—and it also tends to be bulky and awkward in quick-draw situations. But with its smooth single-action triggering apparatus, as well as a nifty 2X scope with a laser
sighting option, the gun offers a big kill ratio and reminds Bob a little bit of what it’s like to drive a Buick Roadmaster with a V-8 engine and two-hundred-plus horses under the hood down a long stretch of straightaway, leaving all the other little go-carts in his dust.

  God bless General Motors, God bless Clint Eastwood, and God Bless Misters Smith and Wesson: Nobody fucks with a .357.

  He checks the gun’s cylinder, spinning it with a dull click, and then takes a sip of well water from his canteen. The water tastes foul and metallic, but it’s cool and wet so it does the job. Bob found a few cartons of cereal bars at the ransacked Walmart a few months ago and has been living on the things ever since. He pulls one from his pocket and tears into it. Tasteless, dry, and stale, it ain’t exactly eggs Benedict—plus, it’s his last bar—but Bob doesn’t care. He feels like a gambler going all in.

  As his unit commander used to say right before a deployment, “It’s fuck or walk, boys.”

  * * *

  An hour of waiting goes by, with the town remaining fairly quiet, and Bob’s legs start cramping and tingling, when out of the blue, a figure suddenly appears on the edge of the woods just beyond the northeast gate. Bob uses the 2X scope and peers around the edge of a smokestack, tracking the figure as he enters the safe zone, turns south, and briskly walks down the deserted sidewalk toward the square. Bob recognizes the only African American in town—the dapper gospel singer Harold Stauback—as the man climbs the steps of the courthouse and knocks on the main entrance.

  A minute later, a sleepy Calvin Dupree appears in the doorway, dressed in sweatpants, yawning and scratching his ass. The men exchange a few words, and finally Calvin invites Stauback inside. The door slams, echoing up across the rooftops.

  Bob looks at his pocket watch. It is now almost seven o’clock, and he can hear other voices rising on the breeze, most of them muffled behind walls and windows, as people stir and climb out of bed and get on with the business of the day. With no newspapers, TV, radio, Internet, restaurants, bars, show clubs, theaters, or any other form of modern entertainment to keep people out at night, the circadian rhythms of most folks have begun to shift. People have started to retire earlier at night and wake earlier in the morning. Or maybe it’s simply a built-in evolutionary adaptation—after all, the darkness brings more hazards. Best to stay inside at night with your 12-gauge next to your bed.

  At last, Bob sees the man of the hour—the square-jawed, toothy preacher, resplendent in his anachronistic wool suit and tie—emerging from the back of his brownstone. Walking with his trademark saunter, he joins three other members of his suicide cult in the dusty street. Bob recognizes the skinny kid, Reese, who first stumbled into Woodbury, along with the preacher’s two other minions, Wade and Stephen. Bob knows that Wade is a former cop, and Stephen is a clean-cut choirboy from Panama City Beach, Florida, and that’s about the extent of Bob’s knowledge about these people.

  Bob has avoided these folks like a hare at a hound dog convention.

  The four men march down the sidewalk toward the raceway arena, greeting some of the other citizens and church members as they come out of their doors with shovels and trowels and sacks of seeds. The group grows as the preacher approaches the racetrack, laughing and patting people on their backs and bidding everyone a good morning—ever the hail-fellow-well-met, ever the politician. Bob thinks that if there were babies present, the preacher would be kissing them.

  Bob feels like puking as he watches the citizens enter the arena gardens with the preacher. His stomach lurches, but not entirely from nausea. The nervous tension has returned. Bob knows it’s now or never, and for a brief moment he craves a drink. He swallows the sour taste of copper on the back of his tongue and casts the thought out of his mind. He doesn’t drink anymore. He may be a drunk, but he doesn’t drink. He knows this is the way it has to be.

  He gathers his stuff and crosses the back of the roof to the wrought-iron guardrail bordering the fire escape. The wind rattles the steps as he swiftly descends. His vision tunnels and his heart thumps as he reaches the bottom of the fire escape and hops off the last rung.

  Then he turns and hurries down the alley, taking the back way to Lilly’s place.

  * * *

  When the knocking sounds first start clamoring through the still, silent air of the apartment, Lilly is having a bad dream. She’s dreaming that she’s lost in a vast warehouse the size of an airplane hangar and dead bodies are lined up on the floor like cordwood, and she has to step over them to get to the exit, but the exit keeps eluding her, vanishing before her eyes, and soon she realizes there’s no way out of this place and the human remains on the floor are all the people she has known, who have either died in her presence or have vanished without a trace. She sees her father, Everett, and she sees Josh, Austin, Megan, Doc Stevens, Alice, her uncle Joe, her aunt Edith … when all at once comes a loud knocking sound, and she thinks to herself—in the dream—whoever is knocking on the door of this terrible place is insane. Who the hell would want to come in here? And the knocking continues until the dream begins to collapse under the weight of the noise like a house of cards in a tornado.

  Lilly sits up with a jerk, the brilliant rays of summer sun slicing through a gap in the bedroom drapes. She shakes off the nightmare and looks at the clock: 7:13. The knocking rises and quickens. Somebody out there really, really needs to see her.

  She hastily pulls on a pair of gouged jeans and a shopworn Wilco T-shirt, and hurries across the apartment to the front door, pulling her hair back in a knot as she goes.

  “We need to talk,” Bob Stookey says to her the second she unbolts the latch and cracks open the door.

  * * *

  Bob takes her across the street, around the back of the deserted brownstone, and in through the rear entrance. Lilly keeps making disgusted, annoyed noises as she reluctantly follows him inside the airless shadows, shaking her head and glancing over her shoulder to make sure nobody is watching. Bob has been assuring her all along that everybody is currently at the racetrack arena, working the gardens and having their morning coffee, and she and Bob are now all alone, but the truth is, he’s not sure. Anybody could have seen them slipping inside the preacher’s quarters.

  Which is why Bob moves quickly through the back hallway, past the galley kitchen with its reeking refrigerator and festering drain, through the living room with its peach crates and newspapers stacked nearly to the ceiling, and finally into the bedroom that smells of old liniment and stale fabric permeated with the traces of ancient cigarette smoke and cooking grease. The brownstone has had a checkered history—before the outbreak belonging to an elderly shut-in, and then commandeered by a succession of the Governor’s goons.

  “I knew he had something up his sleeve,” Bob is saying as he kneels by the bed on creaking, arthritic knees, “but I never thought it would be as god-awful loony as this. You might want to sit down.”

  “Bob, is this really necessary?” Lilly says, standing over him, observing with hands on her hips and a sour look on her face.

  “Just give me a second.” He grunts as he yanks the enormous duffel out from under the bed, the clinking sound of glassware accompanied by the rasping noise of carpet threads tearing under the weight. Bob rises to his knees and unzips the thing. He pulls one of the beakers out and shows it to Lilly. “Get a load of that,” he says. “Go ahead, take a closer look … just don’t spill it.”

  “What the fuck?” She takes the beaker from him and reads the label. “Hydrogen cyanide?”

  “You see this shit most of the time in the form of a gas,” Bob says, levering himself back up to his feet, fishing for a handkerchief, rubbing his sore neck. “Comes in liquid form and crystals as well. Smells faintly of almonds. Goes well with Kool-Aid.”

  “Bob, you don’t know if this is—”

  “Blow the wax out of your head, Lilly!” The abrupt spike in the volume of his voice makes her jump. He needs to get through her thick skull quickly, they don’t have much time, a
nd Bob has an overwhelming feeling right now of being watched. He drills his gaze into her. “Jonestown, Jim Jones—ring any bells?”

  “Bob, slow down—”

  “I saw Saddam Hussein use this shit on the Kurds in northern Iraq back in ’93. It can shut down the oxygen production of a person’s cells in a matter of seconds, and you kick in less than a minute. It ain’t pretty. Trust me on that. You choke out on your own throat tissue.”

  “Bob, stop!” She puts the beaker on the floor and then holds her head with both hands as though it might crack open. She closes her eyes and holds her head, and she looks down. “Stop … just stop.”

  “Lilly, listen to me.” He goes over to her, gently takes her by the arms. “I know you’re just trying to do the right thing by everybody. You’re a good gal. Never asked to be no politician, never wanted to be no hero. But now you gotta step up.”

  “S-stop…” Her voice barely registers. She can hardly utter a sound. “P-please just s-stop…”

  “Lilly, look at me.” He shakes her a little. “In less than twelve hours, these fruitcakes are going to turn this town into a mass suicide.” He shakes her again. “Look at me, Lilly-girl! Now, I don’t have a clue what all that ordnance is for, but you can bet your ass it ain’t meant to celebrate the Fourth of July! I need you to get pissed and get with the program here! You hear me? Are you reading me on this?”

  She crumbles in his arms, her emotions and exhaustion pouring out of her on a tide of tears and snot and grief. She cries and cries, and the sheer intensity of it—the convulsive sorrow gushing out of her in Bob’s arms—is so disconcerting to him, so troubling and unexpected, that he doesn’t even hear the person who has been watching them all along, listening to their every word, now carefully entering the rear of the brownstone with a 9mm pistol poised and ready in his hand, the safety off.