The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,111
against the rear doors—
—and the impact of Lilly’s body against the double-doors springs the latch.
The doors suddenly and unexpectedly burst open, letting a swarm of moving corpses into the van.
EIGHTEEN
A large, putrefied biter in a shredded medical smock goes for Lilly, and it nearly gets its rotten teeth into her neck, when Martinez manages to get off a burst that takes off the top of the thing’s skull.
Rancid, black blood fountains up across the ceiling, spitting across Lilly’s face, as she backs away from the open doorway. More biters scuttle in through the gaping hatch. Lilly’s ears go deaf—ringing from the noise—as she backs toward the front wall.
The Governor, still shackled, scoots backward, away from the onslaught, as Gabe gets a loaded carbine rifle up and barking, the barrage punching through dead tissue and rotting skulls. Brain matter blossoms like black chrysanthemums, as the interior of the van smokes and teeters and floods with death stench. More and more biters swarm the opening, despite the blazing gunfire.
“BRUCE, CUT ME LOOSE!”
The Governor’s voice—nearly drowned by the din, barely audible to Lilly’s ringing eardrums—gets Bruce moving with the knife. Meanwhile Martinez and Lilly unleash a salvo of gunfire, muzzles flashing, the noise enormous, entire clips being emptied, the successive blasts hitting eye sockets and mandibles and slimy bald pates and putrid foreheads, sending black tissue and blood and fluids spurting and flinging across the open hatch.
Bruce’s knife slices down on the Governor’s shackles, and within seconds the Governor is free and has a carbine in his hands.
The air blazes with gunfire, and soon the five surviving human occupants of the van are clustered together against the cab’s firewall, each of them blasting away at will, spraying a hell storm across the rear hatch. The sound is gargantuan, ear-piercing, amplified by the metal fuselage of the van. Some of the rounds miss their targets, ricocheting off the door frame in daisy chains of sparks.
Mangled zombies drop to the floor of the van, dominoes falling, some of them slipping off the slimy back edge of the hatch, others caught in the pile. The barrage continues another ten seconds, during which time the back spray of blood and bodily matter cover the humans in layers of gore. A splinter of steel strikes Lilly’s thigh, embedding itself, a wasp sting of pain waking her up.
Over the course of a single minute—an interminable sixty seconds of elapsed time that feels to Lilly like a lifetime—each and every last ammo magazine is emptied into dead flesh, and every last zombie crowding the doorway drops and slides to the pavement outside the van, leaving leech trails of blood on the corrugated ledge.
The last remaining bodies get stuck in the hatchway, and in the horrible, ear-ringing silence that ensues, as Gabe and Martinez and the Governor reload, Bruce lunges toward the hatch. He kicks the stragglers off the rear parapet, the bodies falling to the asphalt with a splat. Lilly thumbs her spent magazine out of her Ruger, the clip clattering to the floor, the metallic clunk unheard by her deafened ears. Her face and arms and clothing are covered in blood and bile. She reloads, her pulse throbbing in her traumatized ears.
In the meantime Bruce wrenches the double doors shut, the damaged hinges making a loud squeak that barely penetrates the ringing in Lilly’s ears.
The latch clicks, sealing them back inside the blood-drenched death chamber, but the worst part, the part that has everybody’s attention now, is the half-glimpsed landscape beyond the van, the forest on either side of the road, and the switchback way up on the plateau in the distance, draped in darkness and crawling with moving shadows.
* * *
What they glimpse before the doors bang shut challenges comprehension. They’ve all seen herds before, some of them huge, but this one defies description—a mass of dead the likes of which no one has seen since the plague broke out months ago. Nearly a thousand moving corpses in every imaginable state of decomposition stretch as far as the eye can see. Throngs of snarling zombies, so thick one could walk across their shoulders, line the edges of the hill on either side of Highway 85. Moving slowly and lethargically, their sheer number threatening mass destruction, they bring to mind a black glacier aimlessly cutting through the trees and slicing across the fields and roads. Some of them barely have flesh left on their bones, their ragged burial clothing hanging mosslike in the darkness. Others snap at the air