The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,27
faintly discernible, a warning to Lilly, a harbinger of cutting loose from civilization.
She starts looking for walkers in the trees—every shadow, every dark place a potential menace. The sky is void of planes or birds of any species, the heavens as cold, dead, and silent as a vast gray glacier.
They make their way onto Spur 362—the main conduit that cuts through Meriwether County—as the sun sinks lower on the horizon. Due to the proliferation of wrecks and abandoned cars, Bob takes it nice and easy, keeping the truck down around thirty-five miles an hour. The two-lane turns blue-gray in the encroaching dusk, the twilight spreading across the rolling hills of white pine and soybeans.
“What’s the plan, captain?” Bob asks Josh after they’ve put a mile and a half behind them.
“Plan?” Josh lights a cigar and rolls down the window. “You must be mistaking me for one of them battlefield commanders you used to sew up in Iraq.”
“I was never in Iraq,” Bob says. He has a flask between his legs. He sneaks a sip. “Did a nickel’s worth in Afghanistan, and to be honest with ya, that place is looking better and better to me.”
“All I can tell ya is, they told me to get outta town, and that’s what I’m doin’.”
They pass a crossroads, a sign that says FILBURN ROAD, a dusty, desolate farm path lined with ditches, running between two tobacco fields. Josh makes note of it and starts thinking about the wisdom of being on the open road after dark. He starts to say, “I’m startin’ to think, though, maybe we shouldn’t stray too far from—”
“Josh!” Lilly’s voice pierces the rattling drone of the cab. “Walkers—look!”
Josh realizes that she’s pointing at the distant highway ahead of them, at a point maybe five hundred yards away. Bob slams on the brakes. The truck skids, throwing Lilly against the seat. Sharp pain like a jagged piece of glass slices through her ribs. The muffled thump of Megan and Scott slamming into the firewall in back penetrates the cab.
“Son of a buck!” Bob grips the steering wheel with weathered, wrinkled hands, his knuckles turning white with pressure as the truck idles noisily. “Son of a five-pointed buck!”
Josh sees the cluster of zombies in the distance, at least forty or fifty of them—maybe more, the twilight can play tricks—swarming around an overturned school bus. From this distance, it looks as though the bus has spilled clumps of wet clothing, through which the dead are sorting busily. But it quickly becomes clear the lumps are human remains. And the walkers are feeding.
And the victims are children.
“We could just ram our way through ’em,” Bob ventures.
“No … no,” Lilly says. “You serious?”
“We could go around ’em.”
“I don’t know.” Josh tosses the cigar through the vent, his pulse quickening. “Them ditches on either side are steep, could roll us over.”
“What do you suggest?”
“What do you have in the way of shells for that squirrel gun you got back there?”
Bob lets out a tense breath. “Got one box of pigeon shot, 25-grain, about a million years old. What about that peashooter?”
“Just what’s in the cylinder, I think there’s five rounds left and that’s it.”
Bob glances in the rearview mirror. Lilly sees his deeply lined eyes sparking with panic. Bob is looking at Lilly when he says, “Thoughts?”
Lilly says, “Okay, so even if we take out most of them, the noise is gonna draw a swarm. You ask me, I say we avoid them altogether.”
Right then, a muffled thudding noise makes Lilly jump. Her ribs twinge as she twists around. In the narrow little window on the back wall of the cab, Megan’s pale, anxious face hovers. She pounds her palm on the glass and mouths the words What the fuck?
“Hold on! It’s okay! Just hold on!” Lilly yells through the glass, then turns to Josh. “Whaddaya think?”
Josh looks out his window at the long, rust-dimpled mirror. In the oblong reflection, he sees the lonely crossroads about three hundred yards back, barely visible in the dying light. “Back up,” he says.
Bob looks at him. “Say what?”
“Back up … hurry. We’re gonna take that side road back there.”
Bob jacks the lever into reverse and steps on it. The truck lurches.
The engine whines, the gravitational tug pulling everybody forward.
Bob bites his lower lip as he wrestles the steering wheel, using the side mirror to guide him, the truck careening backward, the front end fishtailing, the gears screaming. The rear end approaches the crossroads.