Lilly Caul emerges from the hole with a grunt. She wears her Georgia Tech T-shirt and ripped jeans, her dishwater auburn hair tied back with a rubber band, her .22 caliber Ruger on her shapely hip, her Doc Martens planted firmly on the muddy ground as she twists around and helps a second person out of the subterranean portal.
David Stern, graying and arthritic despite his natural vigor, struggles to climb out of the manhole. Lilly offers him a hand but he stubbornly waves it off and maneuvers himself over the lip of the hole and onto the ground. He hauls himself to his feet and brushes the grit from his silk roadie jacket, his deep, cigarette-cured voice mingling with the shifting breezes. “Let’s make this quick—I have a bad feeling about this one for some reason.”
Lilly closes the hatch, camouflaging it with sticks and leaves, grumbling, “You always have a bad feeling. It’s your default setting.”
“You should be thankful for that.” He tightens his gun belt with a sour grimace. “It keeps you on your toes.”
“I prefer my fallen arches, thank you very much.”
“You’re starting to sound like my wife.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Lilly retorts, and gestures to the east, toward a clearing. “Let’s get in and out, make this short and sweet. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
David Stern follows her as she marches down the trail toward the closest access road.
As she walks, she keeps one hand on her backpack and the other on the grip of her Ruger, which is thrust down a homemade holster tied to her belt. Barbara Stern did the leather stitching on the thing, and even burned the initials “LC” into the sheath—the monogram being more of a practical measure than a frivolous luxury: People in the tunnels were constantly taking the wrong guns from the rack near the exit steps. In the aftermath of the violent and surreal events of the last couple of months, Lilly has come to feel as if the tunnels are a prison, or at best a sort of limbo between two worlds. She relishes these times aboveground, however dangerous or brief they may be. Her claustrophobia is a constant dissonant thrum of tension beneath the surface of her subterranean life, and today, even the threat of rain can’t dampen her enjoyment of this little field trip.
“Wait up, Lilly!” David Stern trots up behind her, breathing heavily. “It’s not a race.”
“Just want to make it back before nightfall.”
“Where we headed first? Drugstore?”
Lilly waves the idea off like a bad smell. “That place is picked clean, even the basement—plus we can always get there through the side tunnels.”
“You gonna make me guess?”
Lilly smiles to herself as she walks. “Thought we’d hit the guardhouse at the reservoir and the supermarket warehouse on the way over to lovers’ leap.”
“Lovers’ leap? You want to go all the way out there?”
“That’s right.”
“Lilly, there’s no fuel up there; there’s nothing but bird shit and walkers.”
Lilly shrugs as she lopes along the narrow dirt trail, her sensory organs dialed up high now, absorbing every noise in the isolated forest. “It won’t take long.”
David Stern rolls his eyes. “You’re not fooling anybody, Lilly.”
“What do you mean?”
“You just want to get another gander, don’t you?”
“A what?”
“A look-see, a glimpse.”
“David—”
“You’re just torturing yourself, Lilly.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“There’s nothing anybody can do about Woodbury. We’ve been through this a million times.”
“Wait!” She comes to an abrupt stop, David nearly colliding with her. “Hold on a second.”
“What is it?” David glances over his shoulder, whispering now. He reaches for his axe, which dangles from a clasp on the side of his pack. “Walkers?”
She shakes her head, gazing around the immediate area, scanning the shadows, listening to the rustle of the breeze through the leaves. She thought she heard a twig snap, or perhaps a series of shuffling footsteps, behind them, in the middle distance, but she can’t be sure.
“Humans?” David licks his lips and gazes again over his shoulder.
“I don’t know. Just hearing things, I guess.” She continues on.
David follows, his hand on his axe now. They walk for another mile or so without saying much to each other. When they get to the intersection of Country Club and Rosewood, they turn north.
The sensation of being followed never completely fades from the back of Lilly’s mind.
* * *
By the time they reach the winding road that meanders up the side of Emory Hill along the eastern edge of Carrol Woods, a low cover of dark afternoon clouds have rolled in, and Lilly and David are exhausted and cranky. So far, they’ve found very little in the way of fuel—a few ounces from a generator at the reservoir guardhouse, and another liter or so in the tank of a wrecked minivan out on Highway 18. Other than that, a few scraps of vending machine food and over-the-counter medication scavenged from the ruins of a truck stop on Interstate 85, and that’s it. They’ve basically come up empty.
All of which makes the climb up that narrow two-lane a more arduous task than usual.
“Just let me do this and stop nagging me,” Lilly grumbles as they finally reach the scenic pull-off that marks the crest of Emory Hill.
“Did I say you couldn’t?” David Stern follows her, exhausted and spent. He has sweated through his silk jacket, and now he has it tied around his waist as he trudges along. His gray chest hair and sagging pectorals are visible through his stained sleeveless T. They had encountered a couple stray roamers about a mile back down the hill, and David cleaved in their skulls with the axe as casually as if he were chopping a few extra cords of firewood. Now he follows Lilly as she steps over a low guardrail and strides across a dirt clearing to the edge of a gravel precipice. “It’s a free country,” he mutters as he shrugs off his pack and sets it down.
“Hand me the binocs, would ya?”
He fishes in his pack, hands over the binoculars, and stands there waiting.
She puts the lenses to her eyes and gazes out across miles of farmland.
Woodbury can be seen in the binoculars’ hazy, milky panorama, so far away that, even at 10x magnification, it looks like a quaint little toy village of dollhouses, a LEGO town, adorable but stained black and rotten with oily floodwaters undulating and oozing down its main drag and branching into every side street, alleyway, and cul-de-sac. Lilly adjusts the focus. The flood reveals itself to be an incomprehensible number of dead, shambling aimlessly, shoulder to shoulder, standing-room-only, ping-ponging around with the random madness of electrons. Woodbury is literally submerged in a sea of cadavers. The countless ragged corpses crowd every square foot of pavement, every doorway, every alcove, every yard, every parking lot, every knoll, and from this distance, the impenetrable quality of it—the sheer finality that radiates off the sight—makes Lilly’s capillaries go cold, her solar plexus clenching suddenly with a massive wave of sorrow and despair so black and toxic that she drops the binoculars.
“You okay?” David looks up from his absent nail-biting. “What’s the matter?”
Lilly has already started back down the sloping pavement of the turnoff.
David grabs the binoculars and hustles after her, calling out in the stillness, “Slow down!”
* * *
The sound of a small tin can rattling—a makeshift entryway bell—fills the dank air of the cluttered subterranean passageway.
“I’ll be damned if that doesn’t sound like our intrepid scouts returning to the fold.” Bob Stookey, his dark, greasy locks pomaded back from his corrugated brow, his chambray denim shirt damp under the arms, looks up from his cup of coffee and sees the thin shaft of pale light shining down from the tunnel ceiling fifty feet away. It’s almost dawn. “About freaking time.”
“Thank God,” Gloria Pyne says from the other side of the rickety wooden table, which was once a cable spool but is now one of the many items repurposed for the narrow stretch of brick-lined tunnel. Gloria has her trademark visor—emblazoned with the faded words “I’M WITH STUPID”—tilted to one side of her graying head, a stick of stale gum snapping nervously on one side of her mouth.
The cluttered tunnel is about the length of half a city block, maybe a little less, with intersecting tunnels at each end barricaded with brightly painted chain-link barriers, installed to keep the underground walkers—dubbed “moles” by Gloria—from invading the space. Once a section of the old antebellum Underground Railroad, the tunnel was transformed almost single-handedly by Bob Stookey into a barracks and living space for the surviving residents of Woodbury, Georgia. Now the air smells of both decay and disinfectant, mold and coffee freshly brewed on a hot plate. Cage lights dangle down, running off the power supplied by two propane-fueled generators situated aboveground, over the far end of the passageway, their feed cable snaking down like octopus tentacles from the stalactite-lined ceiling.
Bob and Gloria push themselves away from the table and creep as silently as possible—not wanting to awaken the children—toward the main entrance portal. In a mirror aimed up at the opening, Bob can see Lilly’s leg thrusting down toward the inner steps, and hears her raspy voice saying, “I never thought I would say this, but it’s good to be back.”
Lilly lowers herself down the footholds embedded in the mortar-lined tunnel wall.
“What in the Sam Hell took you so long?” Bob gives Lilly the once-over, inspecting her pack, her ammo belt, her muddy boots.
She gives him a look. “Don’t ask.”
“Lilly thinks walkers are stalkers now.” David Stern’s voice filters down as he lowers himself, gingerly maneuvering his sore, rheumatic limbs toward the tunnel floor. He lands with a grunt, the contents of his heavy pack rattling, and adds, “She’s convinced we were being tracked by the dead.“
“Nice of you two to drop by!” Barbara Stern’s voice echoes. A middle-aged earth mother in a faded floral-print muumuu and wild gray locks approaches, her eyes shimmering with love and relief. “You had us worried sick, by the way.”
“Don’t start with me, Babs,” David says, his own eyes filling with emotion, reaching for her. She grabs him and pulls him into a desperate embrace. He hugs her back, stroking her soft curves, murmuring, “I’m cranky and tired and in no mood to be chastised.”
“Back home one second and already he’s whining.” Barbara clings to him. “Look at you. You’ve got sweat stains under your sweat stains.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
“Walker stalkers?” Bob Stookey asks Lilly, giving her an incredulous smirk.
Lilly shrugs, wriggling out of her pack, dropping the ruck to the tunnel floor, the contents clanking. “Something was following us. If it wasn’t walkers … I don’t know who the hell it was, or why they were being so … what’s the word?”
David chimes in from across the tunnel. “Furtive?”
Lilly nods. “Yeah, exactly.”
Bob studies her, his grin fading. “You okay, Lilly-girl?”
“Yeah, peachy … Why?”
Now Bob gives her a shrug. “Just asking.”
“Well, I’m fine.”
Bob looks at the others. “Okay, people, let’s give them some air. Gloria, can you go put another pot of hot water on? These folks look like they could use some coffee.”
* * *
They sit in the lounge area and sip instant coffee and chat for nearly an hour about the possibility of a walker actually stalking someone. Bob assures Lilly that the dead have no tactical skills whatsoever. “Biters have the intellect of a snail,” he proclaims at one point, after which David Stern wisecracks, “That’s an insult to snails.” Everybody roars at that one except Lilly. Bob can tell something’s wrong, and he thinks he knows what it is.
During the conversation, Tommy Dupree, the oldest of the children, stirs in his sleeping bag on the other side of the tunnel. Amid the propane tanks, food crates, folding chairs, and bundles of electrical cords running down the walls like vines, the area directly above Tommy’s sleeping pad is plastered with clippings and pages from various magazines salvaged from Woodbury’s library, giving the area the look of a teenager’s room on a submarine.
Roused by the sound of Lilly’s voice, the gangly twelve-year-old jerks awake and scampers barefoot over to her table, hugging Lilly to the point of making David Stern wonder aloud if he’s chopped liver. In recent weeks, the boy has latched on to Lilly—his mentor, his teacher, his big sister, and maybe, just maybe, much to Lilly’s chagrin, his adopted mother—largely in compensation for the tumult that took his parents’ lives.
At length, the adults finish their debate regarding walker behavior, the other kids start waking up, and Gloria and Barbara begin their day of shepherding a half dozen children under the age of eleven through their morning rituals of sponge bathing, eating instant oatmeal, playing card games, and complaining about the smell in the tunnels. David goes off to help Harold Staubach rewire one of the gennies, and Lilly is left alone with Bob.
Bob stares at her. “Something’s wrong—I can see it in your eyes.”
Lilly sips her coffee. “We went out, we didn’t find much, and then we were followed by somebody.… End of story.”
“You sure that’s all?”
Lilly looks at him. “What do want me to say? Where are you going with this, Bob?”
“You saw something out there.”
She lets out a pained sigh. “Bob, don’t go down that road.”
“Just be honest with me.”
“Always.”
For a moment, Bob burns his gaze into her eyes, the worry lines forming deep folds in his forehead under his dark pomaded hair, his kind, sad eyes buried in crow’s-feet. Beneath his gruff, coarse exterior, the former army medic and reformed alcoholic is a tenderhearted, doting mother hen. “You looked, didn’t you? You went and looked at the town again.”
“Bob—”
“What did I tell you?”
“I just—”
“What good does it do right now?” He crosses his arms over his chest and lets out a puff of exasperation. “Lilly-girl … c’mere for a second.” He gestures toward a dark corner of the tunnel. “C’mere, I want to talk to you.”
Bob leads her past the folding tables of the dining area, past stacks of crates containing their supplies of canned goods and dry cereal, past the racks of weapons, past the hooks upon which winter coats and thrift-shop clothing hang, past the curtained-off bathroom facility (people do their business in a bucket, then empty it down a trough leading into the sewer), and finally over to an alcove of crates stacked in front of the Rust-Oleum-painted hurricane-fence barricade. The shadows deepen around them as the faint, breathy smell of the grave filters through the chain-link barrier. Bob speaks in an urgent whisper. “You’re confusing these people, Lilly.”
“Bob—”
“We can’t keep talking about this. You can see for yourself. It’s a foregone conclusion.”
“Bob, these kids deserve to live as normal a life as possible, and that means getting Woodbury back. We can do it, if we all pitch in.”
“It’s too soon.”
Lilly feels a twinge of anger. “The time is now, Bob. The horde has stabilized; it’s not getting any bigger.”
“Yeah, and it’s not getting any smaller.”
“Bob—”
“Put it to a vote, you don’t believe me. Let everybody vote on it, kids too.”
She sighs and looks over her shoulder at the others. Fifty feet away, the youngest kids are splashing and giggling inside the confines of a huge galvanized washtub. Gloria squats next to them in her threadbare Capri pants and high-top sneakers, helping the Slocum twins and Lucas Dupree take sponge baths with the last of the dishwashing liquid.
Gloria has taken it upon herself to be the interior decorator of the group, her latest creation visible in the dim light just beyond the washtub. The little makeshift lounge has pieces scavenged from Woodbury’s Dew Drop Inn—bar stools, highboy tables, plastic flowers in tin cans, a dartboard, and even a poster that says, “BEER IS THE ANSWER.… BUT WHAT WAS THE QUESTION?”
Right now, Harold Staubach and the Sterns sit at one of these highboys, drinking instant coffee and fiddling with exposed wires and circuitry from one of the generator junction boxes. None of these people seems as restless or displaced as Lilly, as she softly murmurs now, almost to herself, “Bob, it’s not legislation … it’s not an act of Congress.”
“What’s wrong with taking a vote? Isn’t that the way you always wanted to run the town?”
She looks at him and lets out another bitter sigh. “I don’t want to get into this now.”
“Are you saying you don’t want to get into a discussion about taking Woodbury back or you don’t want to get into a voting situation?”
“I mean, I don’t want to go over this again.”
“Why not?”
“Bob, these people have no idea what the implications of staying down here are.”
“It’s the lesser of two evils, Lilly.”
“I don’t see it that way. We had something good up there, or at least we saw glimmers of it.”
“I ain’t saying we didn’t. All I’m saying is, this place is our best bet for now. It ain’t gonna be forever. But for now, we got everything we need down here.”
She exhales a derisive little breath. “We got food and water, electrical power, fucking beans and rice, but we really don’t have anything.”
“Lilly, come on.”
“Anything that matters.” She fixes her gaze on him. “We don’t have light, air … the earth, the sky … freedom.”
Bob shakes his head with mock dismay, a crooked little smile creasing his deeply lined features. “How can you say that? We got plenty of earth—just look around.”
“Very funny, Bob. Maybe you should do stand-up comedy down here for the gang Fridays and Saturdays. You’ll have a captive audience.”
He cocks his head at her, his smile fading. “Is it the claustrophobia flarin’ up again?”
Another anguished sigh from Lilly. She would take a bullet for this crusty old medic, she would die for him, but he makes her so goddamned crazy sometimes. “What are you asking me? You asking if I’m willing to put everybody else’s life at stake because I get the shakes or a few headaches every once in a while?”
“I didn’t say—”
“We can’t stay down here indefinitely, Bob. You know that as well as I do.”
He puts his big, grime-stained hand around her shoulder, his touch both tender and deferential. “Look, I’m not saying we stay down here till the twelfth of forever. I’m just saying we stay put until it gets a little less hairy up there. Right now it’s Grand Central Station up there, and I don’t want to lose any more people if I don’t have to.”
She gives him a hard look. “How do you know it’s ever going to get any better?”
He removes his hand from her shoulder and doesn’t say anything.
Lilly glances off toward the barricade. In the shadows next to the fencing, a single heavy-duty power cable snakes down from the ceiling and into a rectangular light fixture aimed down at a row of flowerpots on a shelf. Lilly’s beloved petunias stick out of the potting soil in the purple glow, spindly, sickly, looking like wadded tissue paper. She has given up on her flowers. Now, each day, she watches them die. She mutters, “How do we know they’re not going to be there a thousand years?” She looks at Bob. “Maybe this is the new normal.”
He keeps looking at the floor, shrugging, not saying anything.
She stares at him. “All this aside … we’re vulnerable down here, Bob. And it’s not just the risk of walkers getting in. We’re vulnerable to human attack.”
Bob finally looks at her and gives her his patented sideways grin. His voice drops an octave, coming out with smug certainty: “Who the hell in their right mind would bother us down here?”