The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,19
Chrysler.
The silent dog-whistle urgency of that single imperative—get them away from the children—galvanizes Lilly and sends a jolt of energy down her spine. She turns and swings the shovel at the Chrysler’s front quarter panel.
The clang rings out. The children inside the car jerk with a start. The livid blue faces of the dead turn toward the noise.
“C’MON! C’MON!!” Lilly lunges away from the Chrysler, moving toward the nearest car lined up in the haphazard row of vehicles—a beat-up Ford Taurus with one window covered in cardboard—and she strikes the edge of the roof as hard as she can, making another harsh metallic clang that gets the attention of more of the dead.
Lilly darts toward the next car in line. She bangs the scoop against the front left quarter panel, issuing another dull clang.
“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!!”
Lilly’s voice rises above the clamor like the bark of a sick animal, stretched thin with horror, hoarse with trauma, toneless, a touch of madness in it. She slams the shovel against car after car, not really knowing exactly what she’s doing, not really in control of her actions anymore. More zombies take notice, their lazy, awkward movements drawn to the noise.
It takes Lilly mere seconds to reach the end of the row of vehicles, slamming the shovel into the last vehicle—a rust-pocked Chevy S-10 pickup—but by that point, most of the assailants have latched on to her clarion call, and now slowly, stupidly, clumsily wander toward the sound of her traumatized shouts.
The only walkers that remain are the six that continue to devour Sarah Bingham on the ground in the clearing by the great, billowing circus tent.
* * *
“C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MON!! C’MONNNNN!!!!!” Lilly vaults across the gravel road and dashes up the hill toward the tree line.
Pulse racing, vision blurred, lungs heaving for air, she drops the shovel and digs her hiking boots into the mire as she ascends the soft forest floor. She plunges into the trees. Her shoulder bangs against the trunk of an ancient birch, the pain flaring in her skull, stars shooting across her line of vision. She moves instinctively now, a horde of zombies coming up the rise behind her.
Zigzagging through the deeper woods, she loses her sense of direction. Behind her, the pack of walkers has slowed and lost her scent.
Time loses all meaning. As though in a dream, Lilly feels motion slow down, her screams refusing to come out, her legs bogging down in the invisible quicksand of nightmares. The darkness closes in as the forest thickens and deepens.
Lilly thinks of Sarah, poor Sarah, in her sweet little pink angora sweater, now bathed in her own blood, and the tragedy drags Lilly down, yanking her off her feet and throwing her down to the soft floor of matted pine needles and decaying matter and endless cycles of death and regeneration. Lilly lets out a paroxysm of pain on a breathless sob, her tears rolling down her cheeks and moistening the humus.
Her weeping—heard by no one—goes on for quite some time.
* * *
The search party finds Lilly late that afternoon. Led by Chad Bingham, the group of five men and three women—all heavily armed—see Lilly’s light blue fleece jacket behind a deadfall log a thousand yards due north of the tent city, in the gelid darkness of the deep woods, in a small clearing under a canopy of loblolly branches. She appears to be unconscious, lying in a patch of brambles. “Careful!” Chad Bingham calls out to his second-in-command, a skinny mechanic from Augusta by the name of Dick Fenster. “If she’s still movin’, she might’ve turned already!”
Nervous breaths showing in the chill air, Fenster cautiously goes over to the clearing with his snub-nosed .38 drawn and ready, hammer back, trigger finger twitching. He kneels down by Lilly, takes a good long look, and then turns back to the group. “She’s all right! She’s alive … ain’t bit or nothing … still conscious!”
“Not for long,” Chad Bingham utters under his breath as he marches toward the clearing. “Chickenshit fucking whore gets my baby killed—”
“Whoa! Whoa!” Megan Lafferty steps between Chad and the deadfall. “Hold on a second, hold on.”
“Get outta my way, Megan.”
“You gotta take a deep breath.”
“Just gonna talk to her.”
An awkward pause seems to weigh down on everybody present. The other members of the search party stand back in the trees, looking down, their drawn, exhausted faces reflecting the day’s horrible work. Some of the men are red-eyed, stricken with loss.