The Walking Dead: Descent

by Robert Kirkman

  By this point, Speed is barely conscious, clinging to life as the walkers chew through his midsection, slurping at his entrails as wild dogs might root through a dung heap rife with kibble. Still possessing his vocal cords, Speed manages to let out one last cry of both defiance and rage—an inarticulate bellowing moan, his body shuddering in its death throes, an old-school jock going down for the count with his pride still intact—which reaches three other humans racing across the southern edge of the square. Lilly sees the horrible scene first, but Bob and Tommy Dupree don’t see it until Lilly has come to a complete stop. Bob whirls toward her and demands to know what the fuck she’s doing and has she lost her mind, but all Lilly can do is stare at the feeding as she raises her .45 and draws a bead on her friend, murmuring on a breathless whisper, “Go easy, Speed … rest in peace.”

  The blast takes the top off the young man’s skull, bringing blessed darkness and closure to another one of Lilly’s faithful friends.

  * * *

  In less than an hour, the superherd overruns the town. Later, in the aftermath, survivors will ponder the phenomenon and speculate on the factors that might have attracted so many of them to a single place. Ostensibly drawn by the amplified sound of the preacher’s voice, the horde very possibly could have doubled in size after the noise and light of the explosions—visible from at least a mile away—effectively drawing even more of the creatures from the pockets and enclaves of neighboring farms and villages. Regardless of the explanations, however, by ten that night, the lumbering army of undead had infiltrated every sidewalk, every side street, every storefront, every vacant lot, every doorway, and every square foot of real estate Woodbury has to offer.

  Most members of the Pentecostal People of God eventually get their death wish fulfilled—albeit in a much less humane fashion. Three of the women—Colby, Rose, and Cailinn—are attacked indoors, in the back of the Dew Drop Inn, where they had originally baked the sacraments used in the ritual. Apparently, a pack of walkers got in through a service entrance in the rear and devoured the women right on the kitchen floor.

  Joe and Anthony don’t even make it out of the racetrack arena. The first wave of walkers streams in through the vestibules, surprising the twosome as they try to get out through one of the passageways.

  Wade and Mark perish outside the fence when one of the explosive devices goes off prematurely, injuring both men and making them sitting ducks when the walker army finally arrives. Other members of the church, as well as a significant number of longtime Woodbury residents, die while trying to flee the second wave of walkers that pours into town after devouring Wade and Mark.

  Now only Bob, Lilly, and Tommy remain out on the streets, pinned down, isolated, out of ammunition, huddling in the shadows of an enormous culvert.

  They’ve been hiding in this gigantic sewer pipe for thirty minutes or so, ever since the throngs of walkers got too thick, blocking their escape route and chasing them into the pipe. About six feet in diameter, lined with mossy herringbone bricks, and puddled down the center with at least three inches of stagnant water, the huge stone pipe reeks of brackish sewage. Bob believes it connects up with the deeper tunnels of the Underground Railroad, but unfortunately, the far end of the pipe is blocked by a waffling of iron bars, designed to keep raccoons and larger vermin out of the sewer. The mouth of the culvert—its opening half buried in the Georgia clay—opens out onto the abandoned train yard, which currently teems with walkers of all shapes, sizes, and states of decomposition.

  “Bob, c’mon,” Lilly whispers to the older man, who crouches near the culvert’s mouth, scraping at the floor with the blade of his Swiss Army knife. “At this rate, Tommy will be done with puberty by the time you cut through that fucking thing.”

  “Very funny,” Tommy whispers from behind Lilly. The boy is sitting against the iron screen inside the pipe, his Pokemon T-shirt looking as though it’s been fed through a wood chipper. The boy is a marvel to Lilly—the toughest, nerviest child she has ever known—traumatized by killing his own father, beset with the tragedy of his mother’s suicide, and yet still fighting to live, his little chin jutting defiantly, his sweaty, freckled face furrowed with courage. She could use about three dozen more Tommy Duprees. “What’s down there, anyway?” Tommy asks Bob.

  “A way outta this mess,” Bob mumbles, working and scraping that dull blade down into the pipe’s seam with the persistence of a prisoner trying to tunnel out of Sing Sing. “Most new municipal water pipes are made outta PVC,” he explains while grunting with effort, worrying and digging at the notch, “but these older suckers around these parts, they’re made of cement and mortar.”

  “Bob—” Lilly starts to break in, a wave of goose bumps coursing down her back. She just got a big blast of walker stench wafting across the mouth of the pipe, a mixture of rotting fish guts and festering shit, and now she sees shadows moving toward the culvert.

  Bob is oblivious, obsessed with breaking through the drainpipe’s floor. “The trick is getting through the first layer of composite,” he mumbles.

  “Bob, I think we better—”

  A figure appears in the mouth of the pipe, a huge male walker completely burned to a crisp, with half his abdomen torn open, his entrails hanging out.

  Tommy cries, “LOOK OUT!”

  Bob whirls and raises the knife. The walker’s eyes roll back in his skull, sharklike, as it pounces on Bob, going for the fleshy wattle of his neck. The old medic is lightning quick for a person his age, and he manages to simultaneously jerk back and bring the short blade down into the walker’s forehead.

  The blade sinks, fluids gushing around the hilt, and the walker sags.

  Bob spins toward the others. “Noise is gonna draw more of ’em!” Tommy and Lilly exchange a heated glance. Bob wipes the blade on his pants and nods toward the far end of the culvert. “Try kicking out the bars! Do it together! Give it another good—”

  Movement blurs behind Bob, cutting off his words, making him spin around as dark, ragged figures converge on the sewer pipe. Tommy lets out a startled yelp. Three creatures pounce on Bob—two females and a male—blackened mouths working busily, noxious breaths puffing out of them with each snarling growl. One of them goes for Bob’s face, but Bob kicks out at it with all his might, knocking the creature back against the rim of the culvert’s maw. At the other end of the drainpipe, Lilly frantically searches for something to use as a weapon while Tommy madly kicks at the waffling of wrought-iron bars.

  All at once, an enormous cracking noise spreads across the inner liner of the culvert, sounding almost like ice breaking, as the walkers swarm Bob, and now Bob is yelling obscenities at them, slashing with his pathetic little knife. They pile on him, their weight pressing down on the spot already weakened and compromised by the constant notching of Bob’s knife. Lilly screams as the floor starts to cave in. She reaches for Bob, grazing the sleeve of his shirt, grabbing for his hand, but it’s too late.

  In one great, heaving, swirling eruption of dust and noise, the floor of the pipe collapses.

  The horrible din drowns Bob’s cry as he plunges into the darkness below, the monsters clinging to him, the mass of flesh and blood and teeth vanishing in the dark beneath the train yard. A huge battering ram of a thud rattles the understructure as Lilly crawls to the edge of the jagged hole now encompassing half the length of the culvert. She tries to see into the miasma, but she can’t make out a thing in the dust-choked darkness. She makes a futile attempt to call out for her friend, but she can hardly draw a breath, the dust is so pervasive now, clogging her throat and stinging her eyes. She hears something giving way down below like the wrenching of timbers on a ship, and then a great rupture of water that sounds like a jet engine.

  “Lilly!”

  Tommy’s voice yanks her attention back to the culvert.

  Lilly rears back, falling onto her ass. She blinks and looks up as though snapping out of a daze. She sees the look in Tommy’s eyes.

  “Lilly, listen to me,”
he says. His eyes glow with adrenaline and panic. “We have to get out of here—right now. RIGHT NOW!”

  Lilly sees that the mouth of the culvert is relatively clear, the closest walkers visible in the distant darkness along the train tracks about fifty yards away, scores of them dragging along the rails as though pursuing a commuter train that will never come. Lilly wipes the tears from her face and finds an inner reserve of strength for the sake of the boy, for the sake of the town, for the sake of all those who have sacrificed themselves … but mostly … for Bob.

  She rises to her feet, sniffing back the pain and the shock, and takes Tommy’s hand. Then, in one leaping stride, they both vault over the hole in the floor and plunge into the night.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On the other side of town, outside the wall, on the edge of a wreckage-strewn parking lot, three men hang upside down in an overturned SUV, the engine still rumbling, the rear wheels still impotently turning.

  Partially conscious, bleeding, the man wedged behind the steering wheel still wears his trademark suit coat and is only dimly aware of the other two men in the upside-down vehicle. In the backseat, Reese Lee Hawthorne lies twisted and unconscious on the ceiling, still breathing shallow breaths, his hoodie soaked in blood from deep lacerations down the back of his skull. On the front passenger side, Stephen Pembry dangles, also unconscious, tangled up in his shoulder strap, his assault rifle still warm and smoking on the ceiling. When the wave of walkers closed in on the car from all sides and ultimately shoved it over onto its roof, Stephen Pembry was firing wildly through his shattered window.

  Now the man behind the wheel struggles to stay conscious, blood streaming down his body, dripping off the top of his head onto the SUV’s ceiling like a stubborn leaky faucet.

  Jeremiah Garlitz never thought he would die this way—in an overturned stolen car, engulfed by hundreds, maybe thousands of walking corpses, bleeding out slowly while the multitude scrapes back and forth across the vehicle’s windows, leaving trails of blood and bile smudged on the glass. The preacher always figured his death would be much less ignominious—perhaps even glorious and noble—but now he must face the fact that God wants him to die like this: a wounded animal in this upside-down SUV.

  “Why, Lord? How did it come to this?” he utters through cracked, blood-crusted lips.

  Outside, the shuffling of myriad feet—many of them shoeless and blackened with rot and lividity—mill around the SUV. Stirred by the muffled sound of the preacher’s voice, the dead people rub up against the windows and quarter panels, radiating the stench of the grave. Through the cracked window glass the smell is unbearable, the odor of the devil, the scent of degradation and sin and weakness and rot and evil. The preacher has to gasp for breath—a puncture wound in one of his lungs making breathing a chore—and he fixes his bleary gaze on the ragged, dripping figures brushing back and forth outside.

  He closes his eyes and tries to summon all the love in his heart for his dear Lord Jesus Christ, his savior, his guiding light, and he tries to ask for forgiveness for his many sins, and he prays that his passing will come quickly, and he tries to cross over calmly, peacefully, in a blessed womb of holy spirit, but something intrudes on the moment. The noise of the throng, the collective howls and groans of the beasts, a noise like metal tearing, resonates through the overturned vehicle, setting the preacher’s teeth on edge, pounding in his skull and his sinuses, flaring white-hot in his eyes, tormenting him, torturing him, taunting him.

  “WHY? WWWWWWWHHHHY?!”

  Deep in the recesses of his brain, way back in the secret chambers behind his consciousness, in the dark room where his secrets and skeletons lie in shadows, the source of his pain takes the form of a box, a small metal container with an even smaller door embedded on the top. He sees this box in his mind’s eye right now, as the throngs build outside, drawn to the sound of his screams. He sees a small handle on the side of the box. The SUV begins to wobble as the horde presses in on the sides. The handle on the box turns. The throngs push up against the left side, the SUV listing violently. The handle on the imaginary box turns faster, a tinny, off-key lullaby coming out of it. The horde presses in on the right side, the vehicle tipping the other way. The tune to “Three Blind Mice” warbles out of the invisible box. The wave of walkers rams into the opposite side with so much force that suddenly, in one massive spasm, the car flips over onto its wheels.

  The imaginary jack-in-the-box pops open.

  The rear tires find purchase.

  A little marionette of Satan springs out of the box in Jeremiah’s head.

  The SUV lurches forward through a wall of walking dead, bowling over hundreds and hundreds of moving corpses as the preacher grips the steering wheel with blood-slick hands and stomps the accelerator to the floor. The rear wheels fishtail back and forth across the gore-slimy pavement as more and more bodies are churned under the vehicle, and the preacher begins to laugh in unison with the tiny puppet of Satan in his imagination. The other two men loll and flop limply as the SUV grinds through a sea of guts, and Jeremiah roars with laughter now, his injuries growing numb and cold. The raven-black Escalade mows through an ocean of walkers, tossing wakes of tissue and bile and brain matter up across the fenders and hood, washing the windshield with offal and bits of organs and shards of bone and blood the consistency of silt, and the preacher laughs so hard it becomes ridiculous as he bursts through the last few rows of undead and skids across the access road north of town. And even as he’s careening off into the darkness, free of the horde at last, free of his past, free of the yoke of religion, he can’t stop laughing at the meaninglessness and absurdity of it all.

  He laughs and laughs all the way to the county line, then turns south and heads into the void of night, thinking about survival, sin, and settling scores.

  * * *

  They don’t hear the voices until they turn the corner at Main Street and charge north through the reeking darkness toward the town square. Lilly uses a splintered length of wood from the breached wall as a bludgeon, and she clears a path through the mob as she goes, frantically lashing out at the backs of skulls or fending off attackers by knocking their legs out from under them. Tommy is barely able to keep up with her, swinging his own makeshift club, flailing at the hungry horde with wild abandon. Every few moments, one of the larger walkers lunges at the boy and Lilly has to pause to spin around and impale the thing’s cranium on the business end of her bludgeon. In this laborious fashion it takes them over five minutes to cross the distance between the culvert and the square.

  By the time they reach the grassy patch of land forming the town square, the number of walkers inside the safe zone seems to have doubled or even tripled. They are so profuse now that they stand elbow to elbow across portions of the sidewalk and the tree-lined square. Lilly has to kick over a garbage can along the curb just to distract enough of them to clear a path to the courthouse steps. But once she drags Tommy up the walk and reaches the stairs, she immediately sees the front entrance standing wide open, the huge double doors swinging in the wind.

  Inside the dark foyer, litter scuttles across the parquet floor and the silhouettes of upright corpses stumble drunkenly back and forth. Every few seconds, one of their pasty-white, mottled faces catches the moonlight, a mouth gaping with feral hunger. “Great. GREAT! GREAT!” Lilly comments as she pulls Tommy back down the walk toward the street. “FUCK! FUCK! FUCKETY-FUCK!”

  She decides to head east, and just as she starts dragging the boy behind the courthouse building she hears the faint sounds of voices calling to her—barely audible under the roar of walker noise—and she pauses for only a moment to glance behind her. She can’t see anybody in any of the adjacent windows, nobody on the street but walkers, the sidewalks devoid of human activity. The place has given itself over to the throngs, and it makes Lilly’s stomach clench with dread and desolation. She doesn’t hear the slender female walker approaching from behind until Tommy screams.

  “LOOK OUT!”
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br />   Lilly turns just as the walker pounces at her, knocking her off balance. Lilly sprawls on the pavement, wrenching her spine and hitting the back of her skull on the cement. She sees stars. The female falls directly on top of her, dead flesh hanging in strips off a mummified face, teeth exposed by receding black lips. The moonlight refracts off the creature’s milk-glass eyes, its jaws snapping like castanets, when all at once the air lights up with the flash of a high-powered rifle.

  The blast vaporizes the back of the female’s skull, sending a saucer-sized disc of cranial bone heavenward and making Lilly duck down and cover her head. The walker collapses lifelessly to the pavement as Tommy rushes to help Lilly up, when the sound of the voices pierces the din once again: “Up here! LILLY! UP HERE, GODDAMN IT!”

  Both Lilly and Tommy gaze up at the night sky, and they each see the source of the voices outlined in the moonlight.

  A group of ten or twelve survivors huddles on the roof of the courthouse, clutching each other on a narrow decorative rotunda at the base of the capital dome like lost pigeons. David Stern still has his AR-15 propped against his shoulder, the muzzle smoking from the direct hit on the female. Barbara Stern and Gloria Pyne hold on to half a dozen children, including Lucas and Bethany Dupree. Behind them, perched on a lone gable, sits Harold Stauback, the Voice of Valdosta, the man with the golden vocal cords, his dapper silk shirt practically in shreds.

  “AROUND BACK BY THE SERVICE ENTRANCE!” David motions wildly toward the rear of the building. “THERE’S A FIRE ESCAPE LADDER!”

  Lilly grabs Tommy and charges around behind the building before an approaching cluster of walkers can reach them. They find the oxidized rungs of an ancient iron ladder hanging down in the shadows. Lilly helps the boy up first, and then she hurriedly scuttles up the ladder behind him.