“Wait—please—give me a second.” The chemist holds his free hand up, shivering in the wind, his hunched back pressed against the building, his skinny legs in their shopworn trousers dangling seventy-five feet above the city streets. To Lilly, he looks like a gargoyle nearing the end of its tenure on the roof pitches of the hospital. The noise of the swarm flooding the office behind them wafts out the open window. The wind shudders through the tendons of the scaffold, bumping the rig against the brickwork and drowning the ambient noise of innumerable creatures below.
Lilly holds on to the cable to steady herself, kneeling on the deck. “Okay, okay … we’ll rest for a second but just for a second.”
She looks down. The dizziness courses through her. Her vision blurs, stomach roiling. She can see the morass of dead flooding the street grid, cancerous blood cells oozing down every artery of the city. She sees alcoves and parking lots and courtyards so thick with walkers that the pavement is obscured, as though a moving swamp of black death and ragged garb undulates across the public spaces. From this height, the abandoned vehicles and deserted buildings all look gray, blanched, and lifeless, like dead teeth scattered across the gaping bloody mouth of Atlanta.
All at once, Lilly hears a series of thumps from behind her—very close, maybe within inches—which makes her jump with a start, then whirl around just in time to see a familiar pale face pressed to the glass inside the window of the room closest to them.
Almost reflexively Lilly draws the .38, presses the barrel against the window glass, and starts to squeeze off a shot, when she stops and sucks in a shocked breath. The muzzle remains against the glass. Lilly eases off on the trigger. She can’t breathe. She can only stare at the familiar visage behind the pane that is just now registering the barrel of the gun with an expression that Lilly hasn’t witnessed on the face of any other walker. It has to be Lilly’s imagination but it appears as though the dead woman behind the glass is recognizing the gun as not only an instrument of mortal danger but also, maybe, just maybe, a mode of deliverance. The dead woman’s face goes slack as it slowly cocks to one side in a strange pantomime of being spellbound, rapt, mesmerized by the tiny black vortex inside the barrel of the revolver.
In her younger days, Barbara Stern had been a raving beauty, with a swimmer’s physique and a lustrous flowing mane of blond hair. Lilly remembers seeing honeymoon pictures of her alongside her husband, David, and thinking that Barbara’s younger incarnation—maiden name Erickson—was the spitting image of Cate Blanchett. But the years had widened the woman’s hips and turned her flaxen locks into a matronly, fulsome, tightly curled mop of iron gray. She started favoring muumuus and Birkenstocks and looking like central casting for the archetypal earth mother—despite the fact that she and David had never produced any offspring. With the advent of the plague, the woman’s face fell even further and developed deeper lines, but retained that generous, earthy warmth that made her such a steadfast guardian of Woodbury’s children. Now, that once-generous face stares vacantly out at the barrel of Lilly’s police special with catatonic, simian fascination. The formerly creamy complexion has sunken into itself and turned as pallid as bread dough, dried tautly around the angles of her skull like a Halloween mask.
The sorrow rams into Lilly, volcanic, seismic, practically taking her breath away. She trembles with sadness, the barrel wavering slightly as she shakes with grief, staring at that forlorn monster on the other side of the glass. For a moment, it seems as though the dead woman is gazing beyond the front sight of the gun and directly into Lilly’s face. Lilly knows this is impossible. She knows it’s wishful thinking on her part and yet … and yet … something behind those cataract-filmed eyes staring out at her wrenches her heart. The tears well up, track down her cheeks, and dry in the wind. The barrel of the gun trembles. Her voice is barely audible, even in her own ears. “W-what happened to us? H-how did we get to this point?”
Behind Lilly, the voice of the old man hardly registers over the wind and the pinging of metal cables. “She attempted the very thing you accomplished.”
“What?” Lilly throws the word over her shoulder with the annoyed impatience of someone swatting away a fly. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
The old man looks down. “She begged us to take her in lieu of the children.” He clears his throat. “She was being tested when you arrived.” He swallows. “Later, she became your caretaker … while you were … indisposed.”
Lilly presses the barrel against the glass a few centimeters above the bridge of the creature’s nose. “I’m sorry, my friend … I’m so, so sorry.” The trigger suddenly seems to be mired in cement. Lilly can’t bring herself to put her former friend down. “… so sorry…” Lilly looks down. “… vaya con dios, mi amiga…”
Without looking, Lilly squeezes off a single shot that emits a small thunderclap, puncturing a penny-sized hole in the glass.
The impact of the bullet sends the being that once was a vital, matronly, loving wife whiplashing backward in a mist of pink matter. The creature folds to the floor, gravity claiming her, the stillness of death returning with the speed of a circuit closing.
Wiping her face, Lilly turns to the old man and starts to say something when the loud metallic snap of a cable—as resonant as a high-tension wire breaking—makes the universe tilt on its axis. Lilly gasps as the scaffold suddenly tips, sending the old man sliding and Lilly clawing for purchase on the ancient, weathered, worm-eaten wooden deck.
EIGHTEEN
In some miracle of physics, some innate spark of muscle memory from her brief stint as a freshman gymnast at Georgia Tech, Lilly manages to grasp the old man’s belt before the chemist plummets fifty feet to his death, and thank God, the old codger is so emaciated he probably weighs less than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Lilly gets lucky a second time when the cable on the opposite side of the platform holds, and the scaffolding dangles there between the fifth and fourth floors, hanging in limbo, swinging wildly in the wind with Lilly clinging to the bottom edge.
Lilly gasps and cringes painfully, teeth clenched, her left arm tangled in cable as the apparatus bangs and skids along the side of the building, a giant awkward pendulum. Her left hand has a death grip on one of the stanchions. Her other hand, already greasy with sweat, keeps a vise-like grip around Nalls’s belt. The old man hangs there, his spindly legs churning impotently in the air, breath wheezing out of him as he tries to make a sound, tries to yell, tries to shimmy upward without any kind of leverage. He has managed to hold on to his blessed portfolio with one hand. Down below, all the dead faces in the general vicinity tilt upward, drawn to the commotion with the robotic response of satellite dishes. The portfolio slips from the old man’s grasp. Lilly hears the chemist cry out, and she sees the leather-bound object falling three and a half stories, landing on the awning across the hospital’s east entrance. The portfolio bounces, then flips end over end off the awning, landing on the trash-strewn sidewalk. The impact barely registers a response from the battalions of dead milling about that cracked, weed-fringed walkway.
“Hang on! Hang on, Nalls!” Lilly’s cry comes out thin and hoarse, barely discernible over the wind and the creaking of the suspension cables. “Stop wiggling!—We’ll get it back!—Nalls, goddamn it, STOP WIGGLING!”
Right then, Lilly makes a split-second judgment call. She calculates the distance to the awning beneath them—a little over forty feet from the point at which their feet dangle—not enough to kill anybody, especially if they can avoid landing on hard pavement. She has no idea what’s inside the awning, or if the ancient fabric will even slow their fall, but she has no better options, and she can feel her oily, sweaty grip on the old man’s trousers slipping very gradually but very surely—only a matter of milliseconds before she drops him—so she times her move with the swinging of the massive rig as it pendulums up and then swings back down.
She drops the old man just as the apparatus swings back across the top of the awning.
Nalls
plummets, flailing and convulsing, his rusty howl drowned by the winds. One nanosecond later, Lilly lets go and plunges through space. She lands on top of the old man, the awning collapsing with their collective weight. The folds of weathered canvas swallow them as they drop through a termite-infested trellis and into a trash heap. Landing on her side, Lilly gasps to get air into her lungs, the impact driving a spike of agony through her rib cage.
It takes a few seconds for them to reorient themselves to ground level.
Lilly sits up and pain stabs her side. She can’t get a full breath, and her vision has gone haywire again. She sees the bleary outline of the old man next to her, hunched over, apparently in agony from the impact of her body. The massive stench of the hordes—aided and abetted by the methane radiating off three-year-old garbage—hangs over the collapsed awning like a pall. A few of the neighboring walkers have been crushed in the collapse, their contorted bodies lying amidst the trash heap, skulls caved in and leaking fluids. Lilly blinks and looks around. Blurry images on the periphery are closing in from all directions.
Then she sees the portfolio lying on the sidewalk about ten feet to the north of the hospital entrance.
Lilly manages to stand and wade through the wreckage toward the leather-bound case. She sees a pair of walkers coming toward her, approaching the spot at which the portfolio lies. The mob behind them has begun to coalesce and head this way. Lilly pulls the .38, forgetting that she only has four bullets left in the cylinder. She fires off a round at the oncoming walker, taking a chunk out of its skull, sending it to the pavement. She misses the second one. A third shot chews a divot from the thing’s scalp, the creature folding to the sidewalk in a rotting blood-flood. She quickly grabs the portfolio.
“Lilly, look out!”
She hears the feeble cry of the old man at precisely the same moment that she sees the blur of another biter out of the corner of her eye, a tall, cadaverous female with a fright-wig of gray hair and a desecrated hospital smock, lurching at Lilly with exposed teeth working, chewing at the air. Lilly gets the revolver up at the very last minute and blows a channel through the creature’s forehead.
It takes Lilly less than a minute to get back to the trash heap and grab the old man and drag him toward the boarded glass doors of the hospital. But by the time she realizes that the boarded entrance is impenetrable, and they’re not going to be getting back inside the building anytime in the near future (and even if they did, the ground level is completely overrun and inhospitable), the death-reek and droning noise of thousands of walkers have surrounded them.
With one quick look over her shoulder, Lilly sees that they have very likely reached the end of their journey, and chances are, nobody will complete the project encased in that worn, dog-eared, imitation cowhide portfolio.
* * *
Whether it’s human nature or simply the folly of some of the more stubborn members of our species, the refusal to give up—the aversion to letting go—may very well be encoded in our DNA. It’s apparent in the unbreakable will a mother has to protect her children. It’s present in the human instinct to survive in every situation, from the man in the wilderness finding his way home to the spermatozoa reaching the egg. And it’s deeply embedded in Lilly Caul. Even now. In that wasted alcove. In front of that derelict entrance. In the shadow of that fallen medical center. She feels this unwillingness to surrender smoldering deep within her as she reaches back to the side of her satchel, feeling for the box of ammo, fumbling the carton out of a pocket.
Her hands shake as she tries to flip open the cylinder and feed another half dozen rounds into the chambers. Behind her, the old man babbles softly under his breath that it’s over and all his work has been for naught and now the project will die along with him and God have mercy on them all. Lilly drops a bullet, curses herself, trembles, looks up and sees the tide of walkers—more than a thousand strong—converging on the entrance.
They come from everywhere all at once, a deluge, a mob of biblical proportions, drawn to the last-known humans in the area like metal shavings reacting to a magnet. They come from the desolate doorways and alleys and walk-downs and stairwells. They come from the ruins of public parks and derelict parking complexes. The city becomes a vast clown car vomiting endless ranks of the dead in all stages of decay and ghastly disintegration. Large, small, male, female, young, old, all colors and races and uniforms and walks of life, they close in, revealing more and more gruesome details, entrails hanging from some, the flesh of others dangling from old wounds and missing limbs and partial jaws, strips of skin hanging from some of them like rubber wattle, the sea of eyes a cruel constellation of shimmering coins all locked onto their prey against the boarded entrance.
Lilly shakily stuffs bullets into the cylinder of her .38 as if half a dozen rounds from a small sidearm could actually stanch this torrent. The odor is incomprehensible, a black shroud of degradation choking the air as the leading edge of the mob approaches. They drag through the garbage, stumbling drunkenly over obstructions as they reach blindly for the two humans huddling in the alcove.
Lilly takes the first biter down as it pounces, and a second one right behind it, the booming echoes of her revolver reverberating up off the underbelly of the clouds, washing the second line of creatures in pink fluids and tissue. By this point, the old man has dropped to his knees behind her and has started sobbing as he prays. His left arm is slightly contorted with more than one fracture, his bony elbow bulging. Lilly can hear his hushed moaning and garbled entreaties to God as she fires off another two rounds, hitting the third attacker, and missing the fourth.
Scores more push in behind the collapsing front line.
Lilly tries to squeeze off another shot when a tall female in a filthy robe, slippers, and exposed, mossy-green teeth lunges at her. Lilly drops the gun and catches the thing with both hands. The impact knocks Lilly backward off her feet, the monster falling on top of her, snapping-turtle teeth clacking inches away from Lilly’s throat. Lilly shrieks obscenities and thrusts her thumbs into the thing’s eye sockets and pierces through the gelatinous pupils into the soft meat of the frontal lobe.
The female collapses on top of her. Lilly pushes the dead thing off her and tries to get up. Two more creatures pounce—a pair of younger males, each clad in ragged mechanics coveralls—and Lilly kicks and claws and reaches for the tactical knife that’s shoved down the lining of her boot. She gets her hand around the grip and is about to start stabbing when the bark of the .38 makes her jump. One of the former mechanics whiplashes backward, the bullet plowing through its brain and exiting on a gush of oily cerebrospinal fluids. The second blast takes the other one down.
Lilly twists around and sees the old chemist crouched against the boarded double doors, holding the smoking .38 with both hands, his deeply lined face wet with tears, his liver-colored lips trembling. He utters something in a broken voice that sounds like, “It’s over, my friend … I’m sorry … it’s over.” He presses the barrel to his temple and squeezes the trigger, the impotent clicking noise signaling the empty cylinder, when several developments—each one very unexpected—unfold almost simultaneously.
The horde goes still. Lilly looks up. The half dozen or so closest creatures each pause in their frenzy to cock their heads sensor-like in the general direction of a new sound descending upon the area.
* * *
At first, in some tangential compartment of Lilly’s brain, the sound registers as a helicopter, which is absurd since chopper fuel in this part of the world has long gone dry, and any working aircraft has long ago gone the way of Wi-Fi and the dodo bird. Lilly jerks at a crash coming from across the street. She throws a glance over her shoulder at the old man, who sits thunderstruck, the barrel still pressed to his temple. From the look on his face, it’s clear that he too is taken completely aback by the rising sound of tires squealing on pavement, an engine roaring closer and closer, until finally the first walker body catapults into the air a hundred feet to the west.
> Like a dream in which motion is suspended and the passage of time bends and warps, more and more ragged bodies heave up into the air from the throngs crowding the street. Some of them shoot straight up into the heavens as though launched from a cannon, others tumbling head over heels in a wide arc, their moldering limbs breaking off midair in vapor trails of pink mist, only to land on another part of the mob with watery thuds, compressing the standing-room-only horde.
Lilly rises to her feet. She backs away from the commotion until she stands next to the old man, who has also risen to his feet. They stand with their backs against the boarded doors and gape at the oncoming juggernaut.
The monsters circling them begin to turn, one by one, slowly, to drool and stare dumbly with their shark-like eyes at the oncoming miracle. From the rising drumming of tires thumping over curbs and obstructions to the intensifying roar of the engine, it soon becomes clear that the catapult is a vehicle and it’s coming this way, cutting a swath through the mass of walkers straight toward Lilly and Nalls.
At last, in a cloud of carbon monoxide and arterial spray as profuse as a fire hydrant spewing into the air, the swarm closest to the entrance erupts. Body parts and tissue and whirlwinds of blood explode upward and outward in a particle bomb of decaying flesh. The last few victims are ground under the massive reinforced hood of a dusty, battered, well-traveled Humvee as it booms across the threshold of the entrance. Both Lilly and Nalls flinch and jerk out of the way as the huge military vehicle screeches to a stop right in front of them. Lilly brushes herself off, gets her breath back, swallows the coppery panic on her tongue, and stares at the cracked, tinted windshield on the driver’s side of the Humvee. The side window rolls down on squeaking cogs. The driver sticks his head out, his face bloodless and gaunt. “Better hop in before they reorganize themselves.”
The Walking Dead: Search and Destroy Page 21