The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  TWENTY-ONE

  Pressing her face into the smoky, moldy folds of Bob’s flannel shirt, Lilly sobs with absolute unhinged abandon. She has never cried like this in her life. Not even at her daddy’s funeral, even when she lost Josh last year, even in the aftermath of Austin’s heroic sacrificial death outside the prison a few months ago. She shudders and keens and tries to breathe through the agony, but the pain is coming in waves—so amorphous and ill defined that she can’t even pinpoint the source of it—like tremors passing through her bones. Is she crying for her lost dreams? Is she mourning the normal life that will always be just out of reach in this hideous world? She keeps hearing the old hymns that Harold Stauback sang that night when they all celebrated the sanctity of life and the future of Woodbury in the square, and now she hears nothing but the ugly drumbeat of a funeral dirge drowning that lovely gospel voice, drowning everything good and hopeful with its brute pedestrian clang, a broken gong, a death knell.

  “Honey?” Bob’s voice in her ear. “I know it’s hard. I know you’re hurtin’ … but you gotta get your shit together for the sake of them kids.”

  Lilly lets out a pained, strangled breath and listens to what he’s saying.

  “You got to pull it together, girl. I can’t push back at this all by myself. I can get Speed and Matthew on my side, maybe, David and Barbara, sure, maybe Gloria, but I need you, girlie-girl.”

  She nods. Her face is soaked. She hitches in an unsteady series of breaths and looks at him through the glazed membrane of her tears. “Okay … I’m … okay.”

  He pulls his handkerchief back out and dabs her eyes. “I heard them in the woods, they’re doing it tonight and they ain’t taking any prisoners.”

  She nods, wipes her face. “Okay. I’m sorry, sorry. Let me think.”

  “They’re gonna be back for this stuff soon.” Bob looks at her. “Are you okay?”

  She nods. “Yeah, I’m good,” she lies. Her head is spinning. She wipes her eyes again. “Just let me think for a minute.” She gently disentangles herself from Bob’s arms and begins to pace, back and forth, shooting nervous glances down at the duffel bag and its contents. “Think … think.” She wipes her mouth. “How did this happen? How does something like this happen?”

  Bob gives her a shrug. “Goddamn Holy Rollers, who knows what notions they get in their heads.”

  “But why take us with them?” Lilly’s skull throbs as she paces, a splitting headache threatening to rend her head apart. “Why not just sacrifice themselves? What do they have against us?”

  Bob watches her pace. “I don’t think they see it as a negative.”

  “It’s mass murder.”

  “No argument here. You’re preaching to the choir, Lilly-girl.”

  “But why?” She threads fingers through the loose tendrils of hair that have come undone from her hasty ponytail. “Why now? Here? Why today?”

  Bob sighs. “Who the hell knows what bugs crazy people get up their ass? It could be the summer solstice. It could be the tenth anniversary of who-the-fuck-knows.”

  Lilly feels the anger sparking in her like a flint striking. “What I mean is, why now—today—after the world’s been like this for so long? Why not put everybody out of their misery back at the start of the Turn?”

  Another shrug from Bob. “Like I said, you’re gonna have to ask the monsignor.”

  Lilly gazes across the bedroom and sees the tarnished silver-plated crucifix lying on a cluttered bedside table. She goes over to the thing, stares at it, and suddenly, with one violent sweep of her arm, she wipes the cross and everything else on the tabletop onto the floor. The abruptness of the gesture makes Bob jump. Lilly’s face darkens a shade or two. “Brotherhood of man, my ass!” she barks. “These are Christians? FUCKING HYPOCRITES!”

  Bob stands back, watching, fishing in his shirt pocket for a hand-rolled cigarette. He’s been cutting down on account of dwindling rolling paper supplies, but now he lights one of his last smokes with his Zippo and nods. “You’re not wrong, Lilly-girl.” He takes a drag. “Let it out.”

  “They’re fucking liars!” She kicks the desk chair onto its side. “Fucking con artists!”

  “Amen, Sister.” Bob smokes and looks on with morbid satisfaction. “I hear ya.”

  “LIARS!” With one heaving shove, she overturns the desk. The contents of the drawers spill across the floor as the legs collapse, cracking apart. “FUCKING LIARS!”

  Bob waits, smoking, as Lilly stands in the center of the bedroom, her fists clenched, her chest rising and falling. Her mind swims. She can’t latch on to one single thought. She never wanted to be a leader, never asked to take over the reins of this town, never wanted anything beyond a normal life, a husband, a home, some children, maybe a little bliss. And now this? She put her ass on the line for these lying hypocrites—Reverend Jeremiah and his flock—she risked her life and the lives of her people, and now they’re going to all be snuffed out in a blink? Without a fight? Without a struggle? Like votive candles being blown out after a service?

  Lilly gets very still then. Her eyes burn. Her guts congeal and tighten. A singular, burning urge is building deep within her—a jagged emotion she’s never before felt in this plague-battered world—the need for revenge. At last, Lilly says in a soft, measured, flat voice, “Bob, we’re going to nip this shit in the bud.”

  Bob starts to answer when a third voice speaks up. “I’m sorry.”

  Lilly and Bob snap their gazes toward the far corner of the room.

  Calvin Dupree stands in the doorway with his Glock gripped in both hands, raised and aimed at them, his face twitching with nervous tension. “I’m so sorry, Lilly,” he reiterates in a quavering voice, his eyes welling with tears. “But nobody’s going to stop this blessed event.”

  Lilly and Bob exchange quick glances. Neither of them has a weapon handy—that’s the first thing that registers to Lilly—the .357 is out in the living room, sitting on the coffee table. Lilly’s Rugers are back at her place. Nowadays, she rarely leaves her apartment without her iron, but today she left in a hurry, Bob dragging her out of there like the place was on fire, her thoughts racing, distracting her. Lilly looks back at Calvin and starts to say something when the second thing registers to her: This is Calvin pointing a gun at them, her dear, sweet, lovable Calvin, standing before them like a crazed zealot, ready to kill for a madman.

  “Calvin, what are you doing?” Lilly stays planted right where she stands, makes no move to intercede or approach him. She merely looks into his eyes. “What are you doing? Seriously.”

  His hands tremble with anguish, the gun’s muzzle shaking. “You d-don’t understand, Lilly. I can help you understand. This is for the best.”

  “The best?” She keeps her gaze leveled at him. “Really?”

  Calvin nods. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This is how God wants you to behave? Pointing guns at people?”

  “Easy does it, Lilly-girl,” Bob warns from the other side of the room, and Lilly can’t tell if it’s a ruse or if Bob is sincerely worried that Calvin will shoot them.

  “Meredith always said this wasn’t the end,” Calvin tells them with emotion strangling his voice. The barrel of Calvin’s Glock stays aimed at Lilly despite his convulsive shaking and apparent palsy of his legs. “We know there’s a paradise waiting for us. It’s waiting for you as well.” A single tear runs down Calvin’s grizzled cheek. “Please trust in the Lord.”

  “The Lord we’re fine with, Calvin,” Bob interjects from his position on the other side of the brass bed. “It’s your preacher we ain’t too sure about.”

  Calvin’s tears flow now, his face wet and glistening with them. “God brought this great man here to lead us out of this hell.”

  “What about your kids, Calvin?” Lilly can barely feel her fingertips as they dig into the balls of her fists. “You’re going to do this to your own children?”

  “They want to be with their mother.” He lowers his head and lets the tears s
hudder through him for a moment. “I’m sorry … so so sorry…”

  It happens in the space of a heartbeat: Bob takes two quick strides toward the gunman, and at the same time Lilly whirls toward the window, and Calvin sees both of them moving and snaps the gun toward Bob. “YOU THINK I’M JOKING?” Bob freezes. Calvin roars at him, “I WILL SHOOT YOU IN THE HEAD, I SWEAR ON THE SOULS OF MY CHILDREN!”

  “No!” Lilly moves between the two men. “Please! Calvin, don’t!”

  “I WILL!” His anguish turns to madness, his eyes glassy with rage now. “I SWEAR I WILL!”

  “We believe you!” Lilly tries to dial it down by lowering her voice. She holds her hands up. “We believe you, Cal. We do. Nobody needs to do any shooting.”

  Calvin hyperventilates and stares at each of them, one at a time, his eyes a tennis match, the gun’s muzzle wavering. Bob has his hands up in surrender as well, his gaze glued to Calvin. Lilly takes a deep breath. Nobody says anything for the longest moment. The bottles of clear fluid nestled in the duffel bag on the floor gleam dully in the early-morning light seeping through a crack in the drapes.

  At last Lilly says, “Calvin, is there any way we could possibly put the gun down and—”

  The blast cuts her off midsentence, a photo-strobe-bright flash behind Calvin Dupree, as hot as the sun, the wasp sting of a small-caliber bullet taking a chunk out of the back of his head, tossing him forward as though a cable were yanking him off his feet.

  His life flows out of him even before his body stops twitching on the floor.

  * * *

  A lurid, garish instant of time passes with nobody making a move, both Lilly and Bob just gaping, the soft trickle of blood dripping off Calvin’s skull the only sound other than their racing heartbeats. Calvin lies facedown in a spreading pool of deep crimson. The back of his skull is ravaged by the ballistic damage of a point-blank-range blast—apparently fired from directly behind him—the vantage point somewhere in the living room.

  Then Lilly hears a thud, someone out in the other room dropping a gun to the floor. The soft whisper of a child’s crying can be heard.

  Lilly glances at Bob, and Bob glances back at her with eyes widening.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Lilly utters as she charges around Calvin’s body and plunges into the living room, where Tommy Dupree slumps on his knees in front of Lilly’s .22-caliber Ruger. Dressed in filthy jeans and a Pokemon T-shirt, the boy softly cries. Lilly goes to him. “Oh, Jesus, Tommy, oh, God,” Lilly murmurs, kneeling by the boy, putting her arm around him. “C’mere, c’mere.”

  The boy sobs into Lilly’s shoulder. “I shouldn’t have done it, but I had to.”

  “Sshhhhhh … Tommy.” She strokes his damp hair. “You don’t have to—”

  “I heard what he said to y’all.”

  “Okay—”

  “Ever since them dead folks came back, my mom and dad had been going a little more insane every day.”

  “Tommy—”

  “I thought it would be my mom I’d have to do something about, though…”

  “Sssshhhh—”

  “She was the first one, started acting weird, said it was God’s will, I was afraid she would hurt me or my brother or my sister or maybe even herself.”

  “Okay, okay, hush now.” Lilly hugs the boy tightly, as Bob looks on with an anguished expression. Lilly’s tears run in rivulets down her face “You don’t need to explain, Tommy, I understand.”

  Tommy buries his face in the convolutions of her T-shirt. His muffled voice has calmed slightly. “I believe in God, but He ain’t like no God they talk about.” He shudders. “First, my dad said this plague was because we were being punished, and then he started talking in his sleep, asking God to take him, take him now.”

  “Okay, Tommy, that’s enough.” She presses the side of his face to her chest. “That’s enough.”

  The boy pulls away, looking up at her through his scalding tears. “Is he dead?”

  “Your dad?”

  The boy nods. “Did I kill him?”

  Lilly shoots another crestfallen glance at Bob, and Bob slowly nods. Lilly can’t tell if Bob is nodding because he wants her to tell the child the truth or if he’s confirming that Calvin Dupree is dead … or if he’s nodding for some other larger reason, such as the fact that this was bound to happen so let’s just deal with it. Maybe all of the above. Lilly wipes her tears. She looks at the boy. “Yes, sweetheart, unfortunately your dad…” She feels a paroxysm of sorrow rise in her so suddenly it takes her breath away. She can’t look at the body behind her. She actually had grown to love this man. For all his faults, all his proselytizing and coarse backwoods philosophy, she loved him. She wanted to have a family with him. Now she looks down and utters the words as though they weigh a thousand tons. “He’s gone.”

  Tommy doesn’t respond, just lowers his head and silently cries for a moment, his tears dripping now from the tip of his nose.

  Apparently Bob picks up a cue from this pause because he bows his head, turns, and goes back into the bedroom. He kneels and feels Calvin’s neck for a pulse, gets nothing, turns, pulls a blanket from the bed, and gently—almost tenderly—lays the blanket over Calvin’s corpse. Bob looks up at the twosome in the outer room.

  The boy has stopped crying. He swallows back all the grief and looks up at Lilly. “Am I going to hell?”

  Lilly smiles sadly. “No, Tommy. You’re not going to hell.”

  “Do we need to shoot my dad again?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do we need to shoot him in the head so he doesn’t turn?”

  Lilly lets out a drained sigh. “Nope.” She strokes the boy’s cheek. “He won’t turn, Tommy.”

  “Why not?”

  “The wound is in his head.”

  “Oh.”

  Tommy has calmed enough now for Lilly to lead him over to an old broken-down armchair along the wall. She sits him down and says, “Buddy, I’m going to need you to just sit there for a second while I talk to old Bob.”

  Tommy nods.

  Lilly hurries into the bedroom, where Bob is already pushing the duffel back under the bed. He grunts as he quickly checks the bag to make sure there are no signs of disturbance. “They’ll be coming any minute,” he says out of the side of his mouth to Lilly, speaking under his breath so the child won’t hear him. “We gotta get outta here, gotta get this body out with us … wipe up the blood as best we can.”

  “He has a name, Bob.” Lilly scans the room—the body, the boarded window, the closet—and she sees a plastic fuel container and a coil of rubber tubing by the foot of the bed. “What the hell is that stuff?”

  “That’s mine—I’ll explain later—help me gather this shit up.”

  “You got a plan?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I’m sort of making this up as I go along.” He gives her a look. “How about you? You got any brilliant ideas?”

  “Not really.” She glances out the bedroom doorway at the boy fidgeting in the chair. “All I know is, we have to get the children somewhere safe.”

  “Fucking Jesus freaks,” Bob grumbles as he stuffs the fuel container and tubing into his knapsack. “They’ll fuck things up every time.”

  Lilly feels light-headed, short of breath. She looks at the shrouded remains of Calvin Dupree and utters, “How did this happen?”

  “Hey!” Bob grabs her arm, shakes her a little. “I need you sharp.”

  She nods, says nothing.

  Bob pats her arm. “I know your heart is broken, Lilly-girl, but you need to stay with me, stay frosty.”

  She nods again.

  Bob shakes her. “You understand what I’m saying? We need to get outta here right now before—”

  A series of telltale noises suddenly interrupt from outside the boarded windows—bolt mechanisms on rifles clanking, voices calling out—and the sound of it makes Bob and Lilly go mannequin still.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The good and honorable Reverend Jeremiah Garlitz stand
s in front of the ramshackle brownstone, his shoulders squared off toward the front porch, the wind flapping the legs of his trousers and the tails of his threadbare suit coat as he cradles a 12-gauge shotgun in his arms, giving him an almost regal, Arthurian mien as he yells, “LILLY! BOB! WHOEVER ELSE IS IN THERE! PLEASE DON’T DO ANYTHING RASH! WE ARE NOT THE ENEMY! PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOU HEAR ME AND YOU UNDERSTAND!”

  The preacher fingers the blue-steel trigger pad as he awaits a response.

  Jeremiah has positioned his men on all sides of the building. Most of the male congregants are present and armed and willing to do what has to be done. There are only two absentees. Old Joe Bressler, the seventy-three-year-old retiree, has stayed behind the lines with the women of the church group as they prepare the sacramental food and drink in the back kitchen of the Dew Drop Inn on Pecan Street. Wade Pilcher, the leathery former cop, has been dispatched to the neighboring hills and bluffs above Elkins Creek to prepare the secret apparatus of the summoning.

  It has been less than an hour since Calvin Dupree agreed to join the Pentecostal People of God, subsequently volunteering to serve as a mole amid the more recalcitrant residents of Woodbury. It pains Jeremiah greatly that he has to resort to this heavy-handed cloak-and-dagger routine, especially since he merely wants to give the good people of Woodbury a free ride out of hell and into paradise—an all-access pass to heaven—but so is the way of the world. As it says in John, chapter 2, verse 15: Do not love the world or the things in the world, for all the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

  All of which is why Jeremiah has now positioned Mark and Reese on the east side of the brownstone, Harold and Stephen on the rear, and Anthony on the west. Each male parishioner has been issued a weapon from the Woodbury arsenal—currently a two-hundred-square-foot rats’ nest of a storage locker in the rear of the Dogwood Street warehouse, the dwindling contents reflecting the town’s dearth of ammo and firearms—the key to which Calvin had managed to steal from Bob’s infirmary closet. Now some of the churchmen wield assault rifles, others high-powered semiautomatic pistols.