The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,101
Stevens. The muffled drumming of the storm punctuates the silence.
Alice nods and stands near the light switch, nervously rubbing her cold hands against each other. Her lab coat looks ghostly in the gloomy, windowless office that Stevens has been using for a storage room.
“You called this meeting, Lilly,” murmurs Martinez from the opposite corner of the room, where he sits on a stool, smoking a cheroot—the slender cigar’s glowing tip like a firefly in the darkness. “What are you thinking?”
Lilly paces in the shadows near a row of metal filing cabinets. She wears one of Josh’s army surplus raincoats, which is so big on her she looks like a child playing dress-up. “What am I thinking? I’m thinking I’m not going to live like this anymore.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this place is rotten to the core, it’s sick, and this Governor dude is the sickest one of all, and I don’t see things getting any better in the foreseeable future.”
“And…?”
She shrugs. “I’m looking at my options.”
“Which are?”
She paces some more, choosing her words carefully. “Packing up and taking off by myself seems suicidal … but I’d be willing to take my chances out there if it was the only way to get away from this shit.”
Martinez looks at Stevens, who is across the room, wiping his eyeglasses with a cloth and listening intently. The two men share an uneasy glance. Finally Stevens speaks up: “You mentioned options.”
Lilly stops pacing. She looks at Martinez. “These guys you work with on the fence … you trust them?”
Martinez takes a drag off the cheroot, and smoke forms a wreath around his face. “More or less.”
“Some more and some less?”
He shrugs. “You could say that, yeah.”
“But these guys you trust more than the others, would they back you up in a pinch?”
Martinez stares at her. “What are we talking about here, Lilly?”
Lilly takes a deep breath. She has no idea if she can trust these people, but they also seem like the only sane individuals in Woodbury. She decides to play her hand. After a long pause, she says very softly, “I’m talking about regime change.”
Another series of apprehensive glances pass between Martinez, Stevens, and Alice. The edgy silence throbs with the muffled noise of the storm. The winds have kicked up even higher, and thunder rattles the foundation with increasing frequency.
At last the doctor says, “Lilly, I don’t think you know what you’re—”
“No!” she interrupts him, looking at the floor, speaking in a cold, flat monotone. “No more history lessons, Doc. We’re past that now. Past playing it safe. This dude Philip Blake has to go … and you know it as well as I do.”
Over their heads a volley of thunder reverberates. Stevens lets out an anguished sigh. “You’re going to buy yourself a gig in the gladiator ring, you keep talking like that.”
Unfazed, Lilly looks up at Martinez. “I don’t know you very well, Martinez, but you seem like a fairly even-tempered kind of guy … kind of guy who could lead a revolt, get things back on track.”
“Whatever … you don’t have to listen to me … I don’t care anymore.” She makes eye contact with each of them, one at a time. “But you all know I’m right. Things are going to get a lot worse around here, we don’t do something about this. You want to turn me in for treason, fine, go ahead. Whatever. But we may never get another chance to take this freak down. And I for one am not going to sit on my hands and do nothing while this place goes down in flames and more and more innocent people die. You know I’m right about this.” She looks back down at the floor. “The Governor has to go.”
Another barrage of thunder rattles the ribs of the building, as the silence in the storage room stretches. Finally Alice speaks up.
“She’s right, you know.”
SIXTEEN
The next day, the storm—now a constant bombardment of driving rain and freezing sleet—lashes southeastern Georgia with massive force. Telephone poles buckle under the weight of the onslaught, crashing down on highways choked with abandoned cars. Culverts swell and gush, flooding deserted farms, while the higher elevations are coated with treacherous layers of ice. Eleven miles southeast of Woodbury, in a wooded hollow adjacent to Highway 36, the storm hits the largest public cemetery in the southern United States.
The Edward Nightingale Memorial Gardens and Columbarium lines a mile-long bluff just south of