The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,31

fresh butterfly bandage on her eye. Lilly gazes up at the big man. “What are you thinking, Josh?”

Josh looks around the place. “We’ll spend the night here, take turns keeping watch.”

Bob tears off a piece of surgical tape. “Gonna get colder than a witch’s boob in here.”

Josh sighs. “Saw a generator in the garage, and we got blankets. Place is pretty secure and we’re up high enough on this ridge to see any large numbers of them things forming out there before they get to us.”

Bob finishes up and closes the first-aid kit. The muffled sounds of fornication dwindle in the other room, a momentary break in the action. In that brief stretch of silence, over the sound of the wind rattling the signage out front, Josh hears the distant a cappella of the dead—that faint telltale throb of dead vocal cords—like a broken pipe organ, moaning and gurgling in atonal unison. The noise stiffens the tiny hairs on the back of his neck.

Lilly listens to the distant chorus. “They’re multiplying, aren’t they?”

Josh shrugs. “Who knows.”

Bob reaches into the pocket of his tattered down coat. He roots out his flask, thumbs off the cap, and takes a healthy swig. “You think they smell us?”

Josh goes over to the grimy front window and gazes out at the night. “I think all the activity at Camp Bingham’s been drawing ’em out of the woodwork for weeks now.”

“How far from base camp are we, ya think?”

“Not much more than a mile or so, as the crow flies.” Josh gazes out over the pinnacles of distant pines, their swaying ocean of boughs as dense as black lace. The sky has cleared, and now the heavens are spangled with a riot of icy-cold stars.

Across the needlework of constellations rise wisps of wood smoke from the tent city.

“Been thinking about something…” Josh turns and looks at his companions. “This place ain’t the Ritz but if we can do a little scavenging, maybe find some more ammunition for the guns … we might be better off staying put for a while.”

The notion hangs in the silent office for a moment, sinking in.

* * *

The next morning, after a long, restless night sleeping on the cold cement floor of the service bay—making do with threadbare blankets and taking shifts standing guard—they have a group meeting to decide what to do. Over cups of instant coffee prepared on Bob’s Coleman stove, Josh convinces them that the best thing to do is stay holed up there for the time being. Lilly can heal up, and if necessary, they can steal provisions from the nearby tent city.

By this point, nobody puts up much of a fight. Bob has discovered a stash of whiskey under a counter in the bait shop, and Megan and Scott alternate between getting high and “spending quality time” in the back room for hours on end. They work hard that first day to secure the place. Josh decides against running the generator indoors for fear of gassing them to death with the fumes, and worries about running it outdoors for fear of drawing unwanted attention. He finds a wood-burning stove in the storeroom and a pile of lumber scraps out behind one of the Dumpsters.

Their second night at Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait, they get the temperature up to tolerable levels in the service area by keeping the stove going full blast, and Megan and Scott noisily keep each other warm in the back room under layers of blankets. Bob gets drunk enough not to notice the cold, but he seems disturbed by the muffled bumping sounds coming from the storeroom. Eventually, the older man gets so loaded he can barely move. Lilly helps him into his bedroll as though putting a child down for the night. She even sings a lullaby to him—a Joni Mitchell song, “The Circle Game”—as she tucks the mildewed blanket around his aging, wattled neck. Oddly, she feels responsible for Bob Stookey, even though he’s the one who’s supposed to be nursing her.

* * *

Over the next few days, they reinforce the doors and windows, and they wash themselves in the big galvanized sinks in the rear of the garage. They settle into a sort of grudging routine. Bob winterizes his truck, cannibalizing parts off some of the wrecks, and Josh supervises regular reconnaissance missions to the outer edges of the tent city a mile to the west. Under the campers’ noses, Josh and Scott are able to steal firewood, fresh water, a