The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,32
few discarded tent rolls, some canned vegetables, a box of shotgun shells, and a case of Sterno. Josh notices the fabric of civilized behavior straining at the seams in the tent city. He hears more and more arguments. He sees fistfights among some of the men, and heavy drinking going on. The stress is taking its toll on the settlers.
During the darkness of night, Josh keeps a tight lid on Fortnoy’s Fuel and Bait. He and the others stay inside, keeping as quiet as possible, burning a minimum number of emergency candles and lanterns, jumping at the intermittent noises caused by the increasing winds. Lilly Caul finds herself wondering which is the deadlier menace—the zombie hordes, her fellow human beings, or the encroaching winter. The nights are getting longer and the cold is setting in. It’s forming rimes of frost on the windows and getting into people’s joints, and although no one talks about it much, the cold is the silent menace that could actually destroy them far easier and more efficiently than any zombie attack.
In order to fight the boredom and constant undercurrents of fear, some of the inhabitants of Fortnoy’s develop hobbies. Josh begins rolling homemade cigars out of tobacco leaves that he harvests from neighboring fields. Lilly starts a diary, and Bob finds a treasure trove of old fishing lures in an unmarked trunk in the bait shop. He spends hours in the ransacked retail shop, perched at a workbench in back, compulsively winding fly-fishing lures for future use. Bob plans to bag some nice trout, redfish, or walleyes in the shallows of a nearby river. He keeps the bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the bench at all times, tippling from it day and night.
The others notice the rate at which Bob is going through the hooch, but who can blame him? Who can blame anybody for drowning his nerves in this cruel purgatory? Bob is not proud of his drinking. In fact, he’s downright ashamed of it. But that’s why he needs the medicine—to stave off the shame, and the loneliness, and the fear, and the horrible night terrors of blood-spattered bunkers in Kandahar.
On Friday of that week, in the wee hours of the night—Bob notes in his paper calendar that the date is November 9—he finds himself back at the workbench in the rear of the shop, winding flies, getting shit-faced as usual, when he hears the shuffling noises coming from the storeroom. He hadn’t noticed Megan and Scott slipping away earlier that evening, nor had he detected the telltale odors of marijuana residue cooking in a pipe, nor had he heard the muffled giggling coming through the thin walls. But now he notices something else that had eluded his attention that day.
He stops fiddling with the lures and glances across the rear corner of the room. Behind a large, battered propane tank, a gaping hole in the wall is clearly visible in the flickering light of Bob’s lantern. He pushes himself away from the bench and goes over to the tank. He shoves it aside and kneels down in front of a six-inch patch of missing wallboard. The hole looks like it was formed by water damage, or perhaps the buckling of plaster during the humid Georgia summers. Bob glances over his shoulder, making sure he’s alone. The others are fast asleep in the service area.
The groans and gasps of wild sex draw Bob’s attention back to the damaged wall.
He peers through the six-inch gap and into the storeroom, where the dim light of a battery-operated lantern throws moving shadows up and across the low ceiling. The shadows pump and thrust in the darkness. Bob licks his lips. He leans in closer to the hole, nearly falling over in his drunken state, bracing himself against the propane tank. He can see a small portion of Scott Moon’s pimpled ass rising and falling in the yellow light, Megan beneath the young man, legs spread, her toes curling with ecstasy.
Bob Stookey feels his heart pinch in his chest, his breath sticking in his craw.
The thing that mesmerizes him the most is not the naked abandon with which the two lovers are going at each other, nor is it the animalistic grunts and mewls filling the air. The thing that holds Bob Stookey rapt is the sight of Megan Lafferty’s olive skin in the lamplight, her russet curls splayed across the blanket beneath her head, her hair as lustrous and shiny as honey. Bob can’t stop gaping