The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,112
with the involuntary twitching of snakes stirred from their nests. The length and breadth of the multitude, each face as pale white as mother-of-pearl, gives the impression of a vast, moving flood tide of infected pus.
Inside the van, the primordial terror touched off by this sight stiffens the spines of everyone present. Gabe raises his carbine at Martinez. “You stupid fucking son of a bitch! Look at what you’ve done! Look at what you’ve gotten us into!!”
Before anybody can react Lilly swings her Ruger up and trains it on Gabe. Ears ringing, she cannot hear exactly what he says in reply but she knows he means business. “I will fucking blow you away if you don’t back off, asshole!”
Bruce pounces on Lilly with his buck knife, putting it around her neck. “Bitch, you got about three seconds to drop that motherfucking—”
“BRUCE!” The Governor aims his carbine at Bruce. “Back off!”
Bruce doesn’t move. The blade stays pressed against Lilly’s throat, and Lilly keeps her gun leveled on Gabe, and Martinez trains his assault rifle on the Governor. “Philip, listen to me,” Martinez says softly, “I promise you I will drop you first before I go down.”
“Everybody just calm the fuck down!” The Governor’s knuckles are white on the carbine’s hilt. “Only way we’re gonna get outta this mess is together!”
The van shudders again as more zombies close in, making everybody jerk.
“What are you thinking?” Lilly says.
“First of all, get those fucking guns out of everybody’s face.”
Martinez burns his gaze into Bruce. “Bruce, get away from her.”
“Do what he says, Bruce.” The Governor keeps the muzzle on Bruce. A single pearl of sweat rolls down the bridge of the Governor’s nose. “PUT THE FUCKING KNIFE DOWN OR I WILL PUT YOUR BRAINS ON THAT WALL!”
Reluctantly, the rage blazing in his dark almond eyes, Bruce lowers the knife.
The van trembles again, as the guns slowly tilt down, one at a time, away from their targets.
Martinez is the last to lower his rifle. “If we can get to the cab, we can plough our way outta here.”
“Negative!” The Governor looks at him. “We’ll lead this fucking stampede back to Woodbury!”
“What do you suggest?” Lilly asks the Governor with cold acid running through her veins. She feels the horrible sensation of giving over to the madman again, her soul shrinking into a tiny black hole inside her. “We can’t just sit here on our thumbs.”
“How far are we from town? Like less than mile?” The Governor asks this almost rhetorically as he gazes around the van’s blood-sodden interior, glancing from carton to carton. He sees the spare parts of gun mounts, shell casings, military-grade ammunition. “Lemme ask you something,” he says, turning to Martinez. “You seem to have thought through this big coup d’état like a real military man. You got any RPGs in this crate? Anything with a little more punch than a simple grenade?”
* * *
It takes them less than five minutes to find the ordnance and load the RPG and lay out the strategy and get into position, and throughout that time the Governor gives most of the orders, keeping everybody moving, as the horde surrounds the van like bees swarming a hive. By the time the survivors are ready to launch their countermeasure, the number of dead pressing in on the vehicle is so high the van nearly tips over.
The muffled sound of the Governor’s voice, coming from inside the van, counting down … “three, two, one” … is incomprehensible to the dead, their putrid ears brushing the outer shell of the vehicle.
The first blast blows the rear doors off the van as if they were on explosive bolts.
The eruption catapults half a dozen walkers into the air, the rocket-propelled grenade punching through the dense crowd of corpses clustered outside the hatch like a hot poker ramming through butter. The projectile goes off ten yards away from the van.
The explosion immolates at least a hundred—maybe more—in the general vicinity of the vehicle. The sound of it rivals a sonic boom from a passing jet, the report shaking the ground, arcing up into the heavens, and echoing out across the tops of trees.
The back draft shoots up and out—a convection of flame the size of a basketball court—turning night to day and transforming the closest zombies into flaming human debris, some of them practically vaporized, others becoming dancing columns of fire. The inferno razes an area of fifty square yards around the van.