ROBERT KIRKMAN’S THE WALKINGDEAD​

DESCENT​

By​

Jay Bonansinga​

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PART I​

LAKE OFFIRE​

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“Thedays of punishment have come,the days of retributionhave come;Let Israel knowthis! The prophet isa fool,the inspiredman isdemented. And there isonly hostility inthe houseof God.”

--
Hosea 9:7-8​

ONE​

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On that quiet, unassuming morning, two separate and troubling problems lie just beneath the surface of that burned husk of a village—both of these issues, at least initially, going completely unnoticed by the residents.
The drumming of hammers and rasping of saws fill the air. Voices rise on the wind in busy call-and-response. The convivial odors of wood-smoke, tar-pitch, and compost-stink infuse the warm breezes. A sense of renewal—maybe even hope—thrums beneath the surface of all the activity. The oppressive heat of summer, still a good month or two away, has not yet wilted the wild Cherokee roses growing in profusion along the abandoned train tracks, and the sky has that high-def, robin’s egg brilliance that skies around these parts get in the fleeting last weeks of spring.
Spurred on by their tumultuous regime change, as well as the possibility of a new democratic way of life amidst the ruins of the Plague, the people of Woodbury, Georgia—a one-time railroad burg fifty miles south of Atlanta, only recently reduced to scorched buildings and battered, scarred, littered roadways—have reconstituted themselves like strands of DNA forming a sturdier and healthier organism. Lilly Caul is a big reason for this renaissance. The slender, comely, battle-bitter young woman with the dishwater auburn hair and heart-shaped face has become the reluctant leader of the village.

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At this moment, in fact, her voice can be heard from every quarter, carrying on the wind with authority, drifting over the tops of live-oaks and poplars lining the promenade west of the racetrack. From every open window, every alley, every convolution of the arena, she can be heard selling the little settlement with the verve of a Florida real estate agent peddling beachfront property.
“Right now the safe zone is small, I’ll grant you that,” she is commenting candidly to some unidentified listener. “But we’re planning to expand that wall over there another block to the north, and this one over here, maybe another two or three blocks to the south, so what we’re eventually going to end up with is a town within a town, a safe place for kids, which will one day, if all goes well, be totally self-contained, and totally self-sustainable.”
As the lilting sound of Lilly’s monologue echoes and penetrates the nooks and crevices of that dirt-track stadium—the place where madness once reigned in the form of bloody death-matches—the dark figure trapped underneath a drainage grate jerks its charred face toward the sound of the voice with the mechanized abruptness of a satellite dish rotating toward a signal from space.
Once a lanky farmhand with ropy muscles and a thick crown of wheat-straw hair, this burned, reanimated corpse tumbled through the broken grating during the chaos and fires that engulfed the town not long ago, and now it has gone unnoticed for practically a week, wallowing in the airless, reeking capsule of darkness. Centipedes, beetles, and pill bugs crawl hectically across its pallid dead face and down its tattered, faded denim—the fabric so old and distressed it can barely be distinguished from the thing’s dead flesh.
This errant walker, once a captive member of the inhuman gladiators that graced the arena, will prove to be only the first of two very worrisome developments that have gone completely undetected by every resident of the town, including Lilly Caul, whose voice now rises with each footstep as she approaches the racetrack, the shuffling of other footsteps audible beneath her own.
“Now you might be asking yourselves, ‘Am I seeing things or did a gigantic flying saucer land in the middle of town when nobody was looking?’ What you’re staring at is the Woodbury Veterans Speedway— guess you could call it a leftover from happier times when people wanted nothing more on a Friday evening than a bucket of fried chicken and a track full of men in stock cars side-swiping each other and polluting the atmosphere. Still trying to figure out what to do with it… but we’re thinking it would make a great public garden.”
Inside the festering enclosure of the sewer culvert, the dead farmhand drools at the prospect of living tissue closing in. Its jaws begin to ratchet and grind, making a papery creaking noise as it scuttles toward the wall, reaching blindly up at the daylight filtering through the grate. Through the narrow iron slats of the overhead grating, the creature can see the shadows of seven living humans approaching, and then something unexpected happens.
The thing accidentally wedges its right foot in a divot in the crumbling masonry.
Walkers have no climbing skills, no purpose other than to devour, no sentient awareness other than hunger, but right then, the unforeseen foothold is enough for the thing to almost inadvertently lift itself up to the busted grate through which it had previously plummeted. And as its white shoe-button eyes reach the lip of the manhole, the creature locks its feral gaze on the closest figure: a little girl in rags approaching with the group, a child of about eight or nine years old, walking alongside Lilly Caul with an earnest expression on her grime-smudged face.
For a moment, the walker inside the sewer culvert coils itself like a spring, letting out a low growl like an engine idling, its dead muscles twitching from innate signals sent by a reanimated nervous system. Its blackened, lipless mouth peels away from mossy green teeth, its eyes like milky diodes absorbing its prey.

***​

“You’re gonna hear rumors about this sooner or later,” Lilly confides to her malnourished clientele as she passes within inches of the sewer grate. Her tour group is made up of a single family, the Duprees, which consists of an emaciated father of about forty years old who goes by the name of Calvin, his waif-like wife, Meredith, and their three ragamuffins—Tommy, Bethany, and Lucas—twelve, nine, and five years old respectively. The Dupree clan wobbled into the Woodbury town limits the previous night in their beat-up Ford LTD station wagon, near death from starvation, practically psychotic with hunger. Lilly took them in. Woodbury needs bodies—new residents—fresh people to help the town reboot itself and do some of the heavy lifting of community building. “You might as well hear it from us,” Lilly says to them, pausing in her Georgia Tech hoodie and ripped jeans, her hands on her Sam Browne gun belt. Still in her early thirties, but bearing the visage of a much older soul, Lilly has her ruddy brown hair pulled back in a tight ponytail, her hazel eyes glittering, the spark down in the core of her pupils partly intelligence and partly the hundred-yard stare of a seasoned warrior. She throws a glance over her shoulder at a seventh figure standing behind her. “You want to tell them about the Governor, Bob?”
“You go ahead,” the older man says with a plague-weary smile on his weathered, leathery face. Dark hair pomaded back across a corrugated brow, ammo bandolier canted across his sweat-stained chambray shirt, Bob Stookey stands over six feet in his socks, but slumps with the perpetual fatigue of a reformed drunk, which is what he is. “You’re on a roll, Lilly-girl.”

 

“Okay… so… for the better part of a year,” Lilly begins as she stares at each Dupree one at a time, emphasizing the importance of what she’s about to say, “this place, Woodbury, was under the yoke of a very dangerous man named Philip Blake. Went by the name of The Governor.” She lets out a flinty little breath, half chuckle, half sigh of disgust. “I know… the irony’s not lost on us.” She takes a breath. “Anyway… he was a pure sociopath. Paranoid. Delusional. But he got things done. I hate to admit it but… he seemed to most of us… for a while, at least… a necessary evil.”
“Excuse me… um… Lilly, was it?” Calvin Dupree has stepped forward. A compact, fair-skinned man with the hard gristly muscles of a day laborer, he wears a filthy windbreaker that looks as though it has doubled as a butcher’s apron. His eyes are clear and warm and open – despite the reticence and the lingering trauma of being out in the wild for God knows how long. “Ain’t sure what this has to do with us.” He glances at his wife. “I mean… we appreciate the hospitality and such, but where y’all going with this?”
The wife, Meredith, stares at the pavement, chewing her lip. A mousey little woman in a ragged sundress, she hasn’t said more than three words—other than “Hmm” or “Uh-huh” —since the Duprees arrived. The previous night, they were fed, given first aid by Bob, and allowed to rest. Now the wife fidgets as she waits for Calvin Dupree to practice his patriarchal duty. Behind her, the children look on expectantly. Each child seems stunned, loopy, gun-shy.The little girl, Bethany, stands only inches away from the broken sewer grate, sucking her thumb with a shopworn doll under the crook of her tiny arm, completely oblivious to the shadow moving inside the trench.
For days, the stench emanating from the sewer—the telltale rancid-meat odor of a biter—has been mistaken for the reek of old sewage, the faint growling noise misidentified as the reverberation of a generator. Now the moving corpse manages to squeeze its claw-like hand through a gap in the broken grate, the moldering fingernails jerking toward the hem of the little girl’s dress.
“I understand the confusion,” Lilly says to Calvin Dupree, locking gazes with him.“You don’t know us from Adam. But I just thought… you know. Full disclosure. The Governor used this arena for… bad things. Gladiator fights with walkers. Ugly stuff in the name of entertainment. Some folks around here are still a little jumpy because of all that. We’ve taken the place back now, though, and we’re offering you a sanctuary, a safe place to live. We’d like to invite you to stay here. Permanently.”
Calvin and Meredith Dupree exchange another glance, and Meredith swallows hard, looking at the ground. Calvin has a strange look on his face—almost a longing—and he turns and starts to say, “It’s a generous offer, Lilly, but I gotta be honest—”
All at once he is interrupted by the rusty shriek of the grate collapsing and the little girl squealing in terror, and then everybody is jerking toward the child.
Bob reaches for his .357 Magnum.
Lilly has already crossed half the distance of scarred pavement toward the little girl. Time seems to hang suspended in the air.

***​

Since the plague broke out nearly two years ago, the change in the behavior patterns of survivors has been so gradual, so subtle, so incremental, as to be almost invisible. The blood-drenched early days of the Turn—at first seeming so temporary and novel, captured in those yammering headlinesTHE DEAD WALK and NO ONE IS SAFE and IS THIS THE END?—became routine, and it happened without anybody ever really being aware of it.
Survivors got more and more efficient at lancing the proverbial boil, lashing out without forethought or ceremony, destroying the brain of a rampaging cadaver with whatever is handy—the family shotgun, a farm implement, a knitting needle, a broken wine glass, an heirloom from the mantle—until the most ghastly act became commonplace. Trauma loses all meaning, grief and sorrow and loss are all stuffed down the gorge until a collective numbness sets in. But active duty soldiers know the truth beneath the lie. Homicide detectives know it as well. Emergency room nurses, paramedics—they all know the dirty little secret. It doesn’t get any easier. In fact, it lives in you. Every trauma, every horrible sight, every senseless death, every feral, blood-soaked act of violence in the name of self- preservation—they all accumulate like silt at the bottom of a person’s heart until the weight is unbearable.
Lilly Caul isn’t there yet— as she is about to demonstrate over the next few seconds to the Dupree family—but she is well on her way. She is a few bottles of cheap bourbon and a couple of sleepless nights away from total annihilation of spirit, and that’s why she needs to replenish Woodbury, she needs human contact, she needs community, she needs warmth and love and hope and grace wherever she can find it. And that’s why she pounces on that reeking corpse of a farmhand with extreme prejudice as it bursts from its lair and grabs hold of the little Dupree girl’s tattered hemline.

Lilly crosses the fifteen-foot gap between her and the girl in just a couple leaping strides, simultaneously yanking the .22 caliber Ruger Model SR from the mini-holster on the back of her belt. The gun is a double-action rig, and Lilly keeps it de-cocked with the safety off, a single-stack magazine in it with eight rounds ready to rock, and one always in the chamber—not a huge capacity weapon but big enough to get the job done—which Lilly now aims on the fly, her vision coalescing into a tunnel as she charges up to the shrieking little girl.
The creature from the drainpipe has one skeletal hand tangled up in the gingham hem of the child’s dress, which has thrown the girl off balance and sent her sprawling to the cement. She screams and screams, trying to scuttle away, but the monster has her dress and bites at the air around the girl’s sneaker-clad feet, slimy incisors clacking like castanets, moving ever closer to the tender flesh of the child’s left ankle.
In that frenzied instant before Lilly unleashes hellfire—a dreamlike suspension of time to which plague-folks are almost growing accustomed—the rest of the adults and children jerk back and gasp in unison, Calvin fumbling for the buck knife on his belt, Bob reaching for his .45, Meredith covering her mouth and letting out a little mewl of shock, the other kids backing up wide-eyed and stunned.

By this point, Lilly is already in close proximity to the walker, with the Ruger raised and aimed. Lilly simultaneously nudges the child out of harm’s way with the toe of her boot while she brings the muzzle down to within centimeters of the monster’s skull. The walker’s hand stays hooked inside the hem of the child’s dress, the fabric ripping, the child scraping across the concrete.
Four quick blasts like dry balloons popping penetrate the walker’s cranium.
A clot of blood-mist hits the portico behind the creature while a cookie-sized skull fragment jettisons. The ex-farmhand sinks instantly to the ground. A surge of black blood sluices out in all directions from beneath the ruined head as Lilly backs away, blinking, catching her breath, trying not to step in the spreading pool of spoor as she thumbs the hammer down and puts the safety back on.
The girl continues keening and caterwauling, and Lilly sees that the walker’s hand is still clutched—rigor mortis seizing up its tendons—around a hank of the torn gingham dress. The little girl writhes and gasps air as if unable to summon tears after so many months of horror, and Lilly goes to her. “It’s okay, honey, don’t look.” Lilly drops the pistol and cradles the girl’s head. The others gather around them, Meredith kneeling down, Lilly slamming her boot down on the dead hand. “Don’t look.” She tears the dress away. “Don’t look, honey.” The girl finally finds her tears.
“Don’t look,” Lilly utters under her breath, almost as though speaking to herself.
Meredith pulls her daughter into a desperate embrace and softly whispers in the child’s ear “It’s alright, Bethany, sweetie, I got you… I got you.”
“Don’t look.” Lilly’s voice has lowered into an inaudible mantra, as though she‘s talking herself into something. She lets out an agonizing sigh. “Don’t look,” she utters to herself.
Lilly looks.
She should probably stop looking at the walkers after destroying them but she can’t help it. When the brains finally succumb and the dark compulsion goes out of their faces, and the empty slumber of death returns, Lilly sees the people they were. She sees a farmhand with big dreams who maybe got an eighth
grade education but had to take over an ailing father’s farm. She sees cops, nurses, postal carriers, shop clerks, and mechanics. She sees her father—Everett Caul—tucked into the silk convolutions of his casket, awaiting burial, peaceful and serene. She sees all the friends and loved ones who have passed since the plague swept across the land—Alice Warren, Doc Stevens, Scott Moon, Megan Lafferty, and Josh Hamilton. She’s thinking about one other victim when a gravelly voice breaks the spell.
“Lilly-girl?” Bob’s voice. Faint. Sounding as though it’s coming from a great distance. “You okay?”
For one last fleeting instant, staring at the dead face of that farmhand, Lilly thinks of Austin Ballard, the androgynous, long-lashed, rock-star handsome young man whom she saw sacrificed on a battlefield in order to save Lilly and half the people in Woodbury. Was Austin Ballard the only man Lilly Caul had ever truly loved?
“Lilly?” Bob’s voice rises slightly behind her, tinged with worry. “You alright?”
Lilly lets out a pained breath. “I’m good… I’m fine.” Suddenly, without warning, she lifts herself up to her feet. She gives Bob a nod and then picks up her handgun, shoving it back into her holster. She licks her lips and looks around the group. “Everybody okay? Kids?”
The other two children slowly nod, looking at Lilly as though she has just lassoed the moon. Calvin sheathes his knife and moves to his wife, kneeling down and stroking his daughter’s hair. “She okay?” he asks the woman.
Meredith gives him a terse nod, doesn’t say anything. The woman’s eyes look glassy.
Calvin lets out a sigh and stands. He turns and comes over to Lilly. She is busy helping Bob drag the corpse under an overhang for later retrieval. She stands up, wiping her hands on her jeans and turning to face the newcomer. “I’m sorry you folks had to see that,” she says to him. “How’s the girl?”
“She’ll be okay, she’s a strong one,” Calvin says. He holds Lilly’s gaze. “How about you?”
“Me?” Lilly sighs. “I’m fine.” She lets out another pained breath. “Just tired of it.”
“I hear ya.” He cocks his head a bit. “You’re pretty handy with that firearm.”
Lilly shrugs. “I don’t know about that.” Then she looks around the center of town. “Gotta keep our eyes open. Place saw a lot of upheaval over the last few weeks. Lost an entire section of the wall. Still a few stragglers. But we’re getting it back under control.”
Calvin manages a weary smile. “I believe you.”
Lilly notices something dangling on a chain around the man’s neck—a large silver cross. “So what do you think?” she asks.
“About what?”
“Staying on. Making a home here for your family. What do you think?”
Calvin Dupree takes a deep breath and turns to gaze at his wife and daughter. “I won’t lie… it’s not a bad idea.” He licks his lips pensively. “Been on the move for a long time, been putting the kids through the mill.”
Lilly looks at him. “This is a place they can be safe, happy, lead a normal life… more or less.”
“I ain’t saying no.” Calvin looks at her. “All I’m asking is… you give us time to think about it, pray on it.”
Lilly nods. “Of course.” For a brief instant, she thinks about the phrase ‘pray on it’ and wonders what it would be like to have a holy roller in their midst. A couple of the Governor’s men used to pay lip service to having God on their side, and what would Jesus do, and all that 700 Club nonsense. Lilly has never had much time for religion. Sure, she’s prayed silently on a few occasions since the Plague broke out, but in her mind that doesn’t count. What’s that saying? ‘There are no atheists in the foxhole.’ She looks into Calvin Dupree’s gray- green eyes. “You take all the time you need.” She smiles. “Look around, get to know the place—”
“That won’t be necessary,” a voice interrupts, and all heads turn to the mousey woman kneeling by her trembling child. Meredith Dupree strokes the girl’s hair and doesn’t make eye contact as she speaks. “We appreciate your hospitality but we’ll be on our way this afternoon.”
Calvin looks at the ground. “Now, Honey, we haven’t even discussed what we’re going to—”
“There’s nothing to discuss.” The woman looks up with eyes blazing. Her chapped lips tremble, her pale flesh blushing. She looks like a delicate porcelain doll with an unseen crack down its middle. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Honey—”
“There’s nothing more to talk about.”
The silence that ensues makes the awkward moment turn almost surreal, as the wind buffets the tops of the trees, whistling through the gantries and trestles of the adjacent stadium, and the dead farmhand festers silently on the ground only a few feet away. Everybody within close proximity of Meredith Dupree, including Bob and Lilly, look down with mute reticence. And the silence stretches until Lilly mumbles something like, “Well, if you change your mind, you can always stay on.” Nobody says anything. Lilly manages a cockeyed smile. “In other words, the offer stands.”
For a brief instant Lilly and Calvin share a furtive glance, and a tremendous amount of information is exchanged between the two of them—some of it intentional, some of it unintentional—without either party saying a word. Lilly remains silent out of respect but she can tell this issue between these two newcomers is far from resolved. Calvin glances over at his jittery wife as she tends to the child.
Meredith Dupree looks like a phantom, her anguished face so ashen and drawn and haunted she looks as though she’s gradually disappearing.
Nobody realizes it then, but this frumpy, diminutive hausfrau—completely unremarkable in almost every conceivable way—will prove to be the second and far more profound issue with which Lilly and the people of Woodbury will sooner or later have to deal.

 

TWO


By midday, the mercury rises into the seventies and the high, harsh sun blanches the color out of the west-central Georgia farmland. The tobacco and bean fields south of Atlanta have all gone to seed or have grown into jungles of Switch grass and cattails, the fossilized remains of farm machinery sunken into the overgrowth, rusted out and stripped, as desiccated as the skeletons of dinosaurs. Which is why Speed Wilkins and Matthew Hennesey do not notice the secret crop circle east of Woodbury until well into the afternoon. The two young men—sent out that morning by Bob, ostensibly to find fuel from wrecked cars or abandoned gas stations—had started their journey in Bob’s pickup truck, but now have gone off-road after getting stuck in the mud and lighting out on foot. They cross nearly three miles of wagon-rutted access roads before pausing on a ridge overlooking a vast meadow riotous with wild sedges, deadfalls, and a profusion of prairie grass. Matthew is the first to see the deeper circle of green in the far distance, nestled amid the leathery jungle of untended tobacco plants. “Hold the phone,” he mutters, shooting a hand up and becoming very still on the edge of the precipice. He gazes out at the distant tobacco fields wavering in the heat rays, shielding his deep-set eyes, squinting against the glare of the sun. A lanky laborer from Valdosta, with an anchor tattoo on his sinewy forearm, Matthew wears the garb of a bricklayer—sweat-stained wife-beater t-shirt, gray work pants, clod-hopper boots pasty with mortar dust. “You got them binocs handy?” “Here ya go.” Speed Wilkins digs in his rucksack, pulls out the binoculars, and hands them over. “What is it? Whaddaya lookin’ at?” “Not sure,” Matthew murmurs, fiddling at the focus knob, scanning the distance. Speed waits, scratching his muscular arm, the row of mosquito bites a new development, his REM t-shirt sweat- plastered to his broad chest. The stocky twenty year old has withered slightly from his playing weight of 210—most likely due to a plague diet of foraged canned goods and scrawny rabbit stew—but his neck still has that steel-belted thickness of a life-long defensive end. “Whoa.” Matthew stares through the lenses. “What the—?” “What is it?” Matthew keeps the binocs pressed to his eye, licking his lip judiciously. “If I’m not mistaken, we just hit the jackpot.” “Fuel?” “Not exactly.” He hands the binoculars back, then grins at his comrade. “Follow me.” They make their way down the gravel slope, across a dry creek bed, and into a sea of tobacco. The odor of manure and humus engulfs them, as thick and redolent as the inside of a greenhouse. The air is so humid it lies heavy on their skin and in their nostrils. The crops are mostly in their flowering stage, rising up at least five feet tall among the tufts of wild grass, so each man has to crane his neck and walk on the balls of his feet in order to navigate. They pull their pistols and thumb the safeties off—just in case—although Matthew saw little or no movement other than waves of khaki green blowing in the breeze. The secret crop lies about two hundred meters beyond a gnarled grove of live oaks sticking out of the tobacco like palsied sentries. Through the jungle of stalks, Matthew can sees the security fence surrounding the contraband plants. He lets out a little giddy giggle and says, “You believe this? I don’t ****ing believe this….” “Is that what I think it is?” Speed marvels as they approach the fence. They emerge into the clearing, and they stand there gaping at the long, lush tines of leaves spiraling up rows of mossy support timbers and rusty chicken wire. A narrow path has been cut off the east corner of the clearing, now overgrown with weeds, no wider than a laundry chute—probably once the province of mini-bikes or off-road ATVs. “**** me,” Matthew Hennesey comments reverently. “Holy shit, we are going to have a hot time in the old town tonight.” Speed paces along the row of plants, looking them up and down. “There’s enough here to keep us going until the next ****ing ice age.” “Amazing stuff, too,” Matthew says, pausing to smell a leaf. He rubs a piece between his thumb and forefinger and breathes in the musky scent of citrusy-sage. “Look at that hairy ****ing bud up there.” “****ing-A, Bubba—we just won the lottery.” “Got that right.” Matthew pats his pockets, shrugs off his pack. His heart races with anticipation. “Help me rig something we can use as a pipe.” *** Calvin Dupree holds a tiny, stainless steel crucifix with a coiled chain nestled in his palm as he paces the cluttered storage room in the rear of the Woodbury courthouse. He walks with a slight limp, and he’s so gaunt he looks like a scarecrow in his baggy chinos. He feels lightheaded with nerves. Through the grimy glass of a single window he can see his three children playing in a little community play lot, taking turns pushing each other on a rusty swing set. “I’m just saying….” He rubs his mouth and lets out a sigh. “…we gotta think of the kids, what’s best for them.” “I am thinking of the kids, Cal,” Meredith Dupree counters from across the room in a voice taut with nervous tension. She sits on a folding chair, sipping bottled water and staring at the floor. They each had a can of Ensure the night before in Bob’s infirmary to treat their malnutrition, and this morning they had a full breakfast with cereal, powdered milk, peanut butter, and crackers. The food has helped them physically but they’re still grappling with the trauma of near starvation on the road. Lilly gave them the private room a few minutes ago, as well as all the additional food, water, and time they might need to get their bearings back before leaving. “Best thing for us,” Meredith mutters into her lap, “is the best thing for them.” “How do you figure that?” She looks up at him, her eyes red-rimmed and wet, her lips trembling. “You know when you fly, they show you that safety film?” “Yeah, what about it?” “In the unlikely event the cabin loses air pressure, you should put the oxygen mask on yourself before you help your kids?” “I don’t understand. What is it you’re afraid of if we stay here?” She shoots him an angry look. “C’mon, Cal… you know very well what happens if they find out about my… my condition. Remember the K-O-A camp?” “Those people were paranoid and ignorant.” He walks over to her, kneels by her chair, puts a tender hand on her knee. “God brought us here, Mer.” “Calvin—” “Seriously. Listen. This place is a gift. God has brought us here and He wants us to stay. Maybe that older man—Bob, I think his name is—maybe he’s got medication you can use. This is not the Middle Ages.” Meredith looks at him. “Yes, it is, Cal… it is the Middle Ages.” “Honey, please.” “They drilled holes in the heads of the mentally ill back then—it’s worse than that now.” “These people aren’t gonna persecute you. They’re just like us, they’re just as scared. They just want to protect what they got, make a safe place to live.” Meredith shivers. “Exactly, Cal… and that’s why they’re gonna do exactly what I would do if I was them and I learned somebody in their midst was a mental defect.” “Now stop it! Stop talking that way. You ain’t no defect. The Good Lord has helped us get this far, and He’s gonna see us through—” “Calvin, please.” “Pray with me, Mer.” He takes her hand, cups it in his weathered fingers, bows his head. His voice softens. “Dear Lord… we ask for your guidance in this difficult time. Lord, we trust in you… you are our rock and protection. Lead us and guide us.” Meredith looks down, her brow furrowed with pain, her eyes wet. Her lips are moving but Calvin is not sure whether she’s mouthing a prayer or mumbling something far more cryptic and personal. Speed Wilkins sits up with a start, stirred awake by the overwhelming stench of walkers. He rubs his bloodshot eyes and tries to get his bearings—racking his brain to remember how he had managed to drift off out in the open, without a lookout, alone in such a deserted rural area. The sun is hotter than a blast furnace. He’s been asleep for hours. He is soaked in sweat. A gnat hums around his ear. He shivers and bats it away. He looks around the immediate vicinity and sees that he apparently drifted off on the edge of the overgrown tobacco field. His joints ache. Especially his knees, both of them still full of ground glass from old football injuries. He never was a great athlete. His first year of playing Division III football for the Piedmont College Lions in Athens had been a bust, but he had high hopes for his sophomore year—and then the Turn happened, and it all went up in smoke. Smoke! All at once it comes back to him—what he was doing here earlier when he nodded off in the wild grass—and he feels the simultaneous yet contrary waves of shame, embarrassment, and hilarity that often grip him when coming down off a major dope high. He remembers discovering the clandestine marijuana field just to the north, a treasure trove of sticky, fragrant heaven hidden within the larger acreage of tobacco—a botanical nesting doll—ingeniously concealed from the outside world by some enterprising stoner farmer (just before the Turn came along and crashed the party). He looks down and sees the makeshift pipe that was once a fountain pen, and the matchbook and dark crumbs of ashes lying around it. Speed lets out a burst of dry laughter—a pothead’s nervous chuckle—and immediately regrets making the noise. He can smell the stench of multiple walkers lurking somewhere nearby. Where the **** is Matthew? Scanning the clearing, Speed cringes at the throbbing headache now threatening to split his skull open. He struggles to his feet, dizziness and paranoia washing over him in equal measures, his Bushmaster assault rifle still slung over his shoulder. The walkers have yet to reveal themselves but the smell is everywhere, as though it’s coming from all directions. The terrible black odor of the undead has become a bellwether of imminent attacks—the stronger the reek, the greater the number. A faint hint of spoiled meat and feces will usually indicate only a single creature, certainly no more than two or three, but the infinite variations that herald larger groups have become as catalogued and articulated as an elaborate wine list. A truckload of cow manure marinated in pond scum and ammonia indicates dozens. An ocean of spoiled Limburger cheese, maggot infested garbage, black mold, and pus suggests hundreds, maybe a thousand. Right now, judging by the intensity of the stench, Speed is guessing at least fifty or sixty roaming nearby. He raises the gun, walks along the edge of the tobacco field, and calls out in a loud whisper, “Matt! Hey, Hennesey—where you at?” No reply. Only the faintest of rustling noises to his immediate left—behind the wall of green—where the untended crop rises at least five or six feet high, consisting of old tobacco, ironweed, and wild bush. The enormous wrinkled leaves make a ghostly noise in the breeze, the whisper of papery friction, like match-heads striking. Something moves shark-like out in the sea of khaki green. Speed jerks toward the shadow. Something is moving slowly this way, the dry stalks and husks below snapping in arrhythmic tattoo as the clumsy footsteps approach. Raising the muzzle, Speed puts the cross hair on the dark mound skimming over the tops of the plants. He sucks in a breath. The figure is twenty-five yards away. He begins squeezing the trigger when the sound of a voice makes him freeze. “Yo!” Speed jerks toward the voice and sees Matthew Hennesey standing in front of him, out of breath, holding his Glock 23 with its silencer attached. Only a few years older than Speed, Matthew Hennesey is taller and lankier and so weathered, wind-burned, and tan in his faded denims he looks like a walking piece of beef jerky. “Jesus,” Speed utters, lowering the rifle. “Don’t ****ing sneak up on me like that—just about shit my pants.” “Get down,” Matthew orders softly yet firmly. “Now, Speed, do it.” “Huh?” Still slightly woozy from the weed, Speed stares at his friend. “Do what?” “Duck, man! DUCK!” Blinking, swallowing hard, Speed crouches down, realizing there’s a figure directly behind him. He glances over his shoulder, and for a single instant, right before the dry pop of the Glock, he sees a blur of putrid flesh lunging at him. The female walker is an old woman in tatters with blue-rinse hair like a fright wig and breath that smells of the crypt, and hack saw teeth. Speed jerks down. The muffled blast snaps, and the old woman’s head erupts in a fountain of black spinal fluid and brain matter, the flaccid body sagging to the ground in a heap. “****!” Speed springs to his feet. “****!” He scans the adjacent tobacco field and sees at least a half a dozen more ragged heads moving convulsively over the tops of the weeds and tassels, coming toward him. “****!—****!—****!!” “C’mon, Homey!” Matthew grabs a hunk of Speed’s t-shirt and pulls him toward the trail. “Something else I want to show you before we head back.” Speed stumbles after his friend. “Okay, okay… I’m coming… Jesus Christ, what’s the rush?” “You’ll see,” Matthew mutters, his thoughts elsewhere. *** The highest point in Meriwether County is located in the rural hinterlands, not far from the intersection of Highway 85 and Millard Drive, just outside a deserted farm town called Yarlsburg. Millard winds up a steep hill, cutting through a thick copse of pine, and then skirts the edge of a mile-long plateau that overlooks a patchwork of farm fields. At one point along this scabrous road, near a wide spot used for blow-outs and piss-stops, a rust-pocked, bullet-riddled sign proclaims, without a speck of irony, “SCENIC VISTA,” as though this impoverished, hillbilly farmland were an exotic national park (and not some backwater barrens smack dab in the middle of nowhere). It takes Matthew and Speed about a half an hour to reach this turn-off. First, they have to circle back to where Bob’s pick-up is stuck in the mire along Highway 85, and then use discarded cardboard boxes under the massive tires to provide traction. Once they got the vehicle moving, they have to cross five miles of wreckage-strewn black top macadam in order to reach Millard. They see small phalanxes of walkers along the way, some of them shambling out into their path. Matthew has no qualms swerving toward the creatures and knocking them to Kingdom Come with the front bumper like so many blood-filled bowling pins. This slows them down a bit, but they finally see Millard looming in the dusty heat waves ahead of them. Then it’s a quick shot north into the hills above Yarlsburg. Speed keeps quizzing Matthew about what the hell is so important that they have to go twenty or thirty miles out of their way. Matthew plays it coy, explaining that it’ll all make sense soon enough. Speed gets angry. Why the **** can’t Matthew just tell him why they’re going on this wild goose chase? What the hell is it that he wants Speed to see? Is it some fuel source they didn’t think of? Is it an untapped retail outlet? Another Walmart they missed? Why all the mystery? Matthew just keeps nervously chewing the inside of his cheek and driving north and not saying much. As they approach the overlook, Speed realizes all at once, in a sick, stomach-churning bolt of recognition, that this is the same place the Governor staged all the military vehicles in the moments before the battle for the prison. Gazing out across the woods, Speed realizes then that they are within a mile or two of the vast gray-brick complex known as the Meriwether County Correctional Facility, and an unexpected jolt of dread travels down his spine. Post-traumatic stress comes in many flavors. It can steal sleep and spark hallucinations. Or it can sublimate itself sneakily into destructive behaviors, drug abuse, alcoholism, or sex-addiction. Or it can be subtly debilitating—chronic panic attacks, an intermittent pinch of the nerves of the solar plexus at odd, inexplicable times. Speed feels this vague, inchoate dread right now in his bowels as Matthew pulls the truck over onto the dusty apron of weed-whiskered gravel and kills the engine.

 

This area was the sight of profound mayhem—many deaths, some of them Speed’s close friends from Woodbury—and the miserable vibrations still strum at the air. The prison was where the Governor made his last stand—Custer-like, psychotic, megalomaniacal to the bitter end. It also was the place in which Speed Wilkins first registered the natural leadership capabilities of Lilly Caul. Now Matthew climbs out of the truck with the binoculars already in his hands. Speed kicks his door open with a rusty shriek of hinges and hops out of the truck. The first thing he notices is the overpowering scent of dead flesh hanging in the air, mingling with the acrid tang of smoke. He follows Matthew across the wide spot in the road toward the woods. The tire tracks from the Governor’s massive convoy still scar the dirt, even the waffle-shaped imprint of the Abrams tank can be seen, and Speed tries to avoid looking at the tracks as he joins Matthew at the edge of the forest. “Here, take a look down in the meadow.” Matthew points toward a clearing in the thick veil of pine boughs and wild scrub, and hands over the binoculars. “And tell me what you see.” Speed steps across the clearing to the edge of the precipice and gets his first good glimpse of the prison in the distance. The two hundred acre lot is still bound in a faint fog of smoke. Some of the caved-in cell-blocks still smolder, and will probably continue to do so for weeks. The complex looks like the ruins of some strange and gothic Mayan temple. The odor is stronger now, and Speed feels his stomach flip with nausea. With his naked eye he can see the collapsed cyclone fence wreathing the property like torn ribbons, the scorched husks of guard towers, and the blackened craters punched into the cement yards from grenade blasts. Abandoned vehicles litter the surrounding lots and broken glass glitters everywhere. Like ragged phantoms wandering a ghost town, walkers lumber here and there without purpose or direction. Speed puts the binoculars to his eyes. “What am I looking for?” he asks while scanning the outer lots. “You see the woods to the south?” Speed swings the binoculars over to the left and sees the hazy green edge of the pine forest lining the property. He sucks in a breath. The incredible stench of maggot-infested meat and human shit makes his gorge rise and his mouth water sourly. “Jesus H. Christ,” he utters, gaping at the multitudes of undead. “What the ****?” “Exactly.” Matthew lets out a sigh. “All the commotion of the battle must have drawn more of them out of the woodwork than we ever knew. This is just the tail end. Who knows how ****ing many of them there are.” “I remember the herd,” Speed says, licking his lips. “But I don’t remember anything like this.” From this distance, even through the lenses of the field glasses, the swarm looks like a tsunami slowly spreading through the woods. Already thousands strong, the herd seems to be gathering strength and number, spreading and weaving through the trees, its participants bumping into each other, lumbering behind the foliage like cancerous cells taking over a blood stream. There seems to be a general flow to the madness, a sort of default direction in which the swarm is heading, as though instinct or the vagaries of the terrain or some other unknown factor is tugging the ghastly throng toward some clarion call to the east. Is it random chance? Is there a reason for this unexpected migratory pattern? Speed realizes the implications of what he is seeing right as the rancid air gets the better of him, and he doubles over, falling to his knees. It dawns on him—just exactly what this means—right as the hot, burning bile stirred by the stench rises up his esophagus. Still slightly high from all the dope, he drops to his hands and knees and roars vomit across the coarse, gravelly earth of the precipice. He hasn’t eaten much that day, and most of it is yellowish bile, but it sluices out of him with gusto. Matthew watches solemnly from a few feet away, staring down at his upchucking pal with mild interest. After a few minutes it becomes clear that Speed has spewed every last ounce of stomach acids within him, his right hand still clutching the binoculars, and he sits back with a gasp, wiping the cold sweat from his brow. Matthew waits for the younger man to get his bearings. At last Matthew lets out a sigh and says, “You finished?” Speed nods and tries to take deep breaths. He doesn’t say anything. “Good.” Matthew leans down and snatches the binoculars away from him. “Because we gotta get back ASAP and do something about this.”

 

So, it looks like Lilly's managing as well as could be expected. But I think the real take-away information from these chapters, is the fact that the remaining residents of Woodbury encounter the Mega-Herd before Rick's group does. I though that was pretty cool, as far as continuity goes.

 

Maybe there's more than meets the eye to Matthew Hennessy and his knowledge of the pot field, the herd, and his strange disappearance during Speeds weed-coma. Could be there's strange things afoot, that's why is seems so suspicious maybe?

I too am interested in the mental illness factor in Meredith. They make it seem like she's going to be a real problem, makes me wonder what her specific affliction is?

 

Yeah, that's the direction I was heading in as well. I've known a few people over the years who suffered from bipolar disorder, mostly women. When they went off their meds, and when they would go manic, it was down right scary sometimes. Those manic phases can manifest themselves in so many different, terrible, and destructive ways. I could see how a person like this, with her own ideals and motives could be real big trouble for the unstable powder-keg that is Woodbury, GA.

 

Something else I always wondered about, a little off topic, but these chapters jogged my memory; is the identification of the county Woodbury resides in, as well as the name of the prison. Meriwether County, and Meriwether County Correctional Facility. Thing is, the town of Woodbury,GA situated in Meriwether County is a completely real place. I wonder why they chose not to film there? I guess maybe it's not a cinema friendly town, and doesn't exhibit the proper "look". I do know Senoia has been redesigned and remodeled over the years to cater to the film industry, they have special locations around town that are designed for staging props and storing equipment, they have special power outlets and various utility hooks ups all over town so the filming crews can run their equipment anywhere, they've even constructed certain picturesque pieces of architecture to make the town more aesthetically pleasing and better suited to cinematography. But, other than that, I don't understand why they wouldn't want to film in the actual town.