The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,100
of confusion. Who fired the kill shot? Lilly never pulled the trigger. Who did the deed? Lilly blinks away her tears and manages to focus on the Governor standing over her, his grave expression fixed on something to his right.
Bob Stookey stands over the corpse of Megan Lafferty with a .38 police special still clutched in his hand, his shooting arm dangling at his side, a thin wisp of gun smoke still curling out of the barrel.
The desolation on Bob’s weathered, deeply lined face is heartbreaking.
* * *
Those next few days, nobody pays much attention to the changing weather.
Bob is too busy drinking himself to death to notice anything as trivial as weather fronts, and Lilly occupies herself arranging a proper burial for Megan in a plot next to Josh. The Governor spends most of his time preparing for the next big battle in the racetrack arena. He has big plans for the next round of shows, integrating zombies into the gladiatorial matches.
Gabe and Bruce busy themselves with the nasty job of hacking up the dead guardsmen in an auxiliary warehouse beneath the track. The Governor needs body parts to feed the growing menagerie of zombies being housed in a secret room deep in the cinder-block catacombs. Gabe and Bruce enlist some of the younger men from Martinez’s crew to work the chain saws in the festering, cavernous abattoir next to the morgue, rendering human remains into meat.
Meanwhile, the January rains move into the area with slow, insidious menace.
At first, the outer bands of the storm system cause very little alarm—a few scattered showers swelling the storm sewers and icing the streets—with temperatures hovering above freezing. But the distant lightning and roiling black skies on the western horizon begin to worry people. Nobody knows with any degree of certainty—nor will they ever know—why this winter turns out to be anomalous for Georgia. The state’s relatively mild winters can be occasionally shattered by torrential rains, a nasty snowfall or two, or an ice storm here and there, but no one is prepared for what is about to sweep down across the fruit belt on a low-pressure cell slamming in from Canada.
The National Weather Service out of Peachtree City—still limping along on generators and shortwave radios—issues an early warning that week on as many frequencies as they can spark. But very few listeners benefit from the news. Only a handful of souls hear the frantic voice of the harried meteorologist, Barry Gooden, ranting about the blizzard of ’93 and the floods of 2009.
According to Gooden, the bitter cold front that will smash down upon the American South over the next twenty-four hours will collide with the moist, mild, warm surface temperatures of central Georgia and very likely make these other winter storms seem like passing sprinkles. With seventy-mile-an-hour winds in the forecast, as well as dangerous lightning and a mixture of rain and sleet, the storm promises to play unprecedented havoc with the plague-ridden state. Not only will the volatile swings in temperature threaten to turn the gulley washers into blizzards, but—as the state learned only a couple of years earlier, and now with the advent of the plague—Georgians are woefully unprepared for the ravages of flooding.
A few years back, a major storm pushed the Chattahoochee River over its banks and into the highly populated areas around Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Marietta. Mudslides tore homes from their foundations. Highways lay underwater and the catastrophe resulted in dozens of deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars of damage. But this year—this monster forming over the Mississippi, unfurling at an alarming rate of speed—promises to be off the charts.
The first signs of extraordinary weather roar into town that Friday afternoon.
By nightfall the rain is coming down at a forty-five-degree angle on fifty-mile-an-hour gusts, falling in sheets against Woodbury’s barricade, making defunct high-tension wires across the center of town sing and snap like bullwhips. Volleys of lightning turn the dark alleys to silver flickering photographic negatives, and the gutters spill over across Main Street. Most of Woodbury’s inhabitants hunker down inside for the duration … leaving the sidewalks and boarded storefronts deserted …
… mostly deserted, that is, except for a group of four residents, who brave the rains in order to gather surreptitiously in an office beneath the racetrack.
* * *
“Leave the light off, Alice, if you don’t mind,” a voice says from the shadows behind a desk. The dull glimmer of wire-framed spectacles floating in the darkness is the only thing that identifies Dr.