The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,36
and leans down and kisses her cheek. It’s a warm kiss—soft, tender, a promise of more to come. “Timing, you know,” he says then. He picks up the shotgun. “Not safe here … don’t feel right.”
For a moment, Lilly can’t figure out whether he’s referring to the woods not being right, or if he’s talking about the two of them. “I’m sorry if I—”
He gently touches her lips. “I want it to be just right … when the time comes.”
His smile is the most guileless, clean, sweet smile Lilly has ever seen. She returns his smile, her eyes misting over. Who would have thought, in the midst of all this horror—a perfect gentleman?
Lilly starts to say something else when a sharp noise grabs their attention.
* * *
Josh hears the faint drumming of hooves first, and gently shoves Lilly back behind him. He raises the squirrel gun’s rusty single barrel. The pounding noises rise. Josh thumbs the hammer back.
At first, he thinks he’s seeing things. Above them, coming down the embankment, throwing leaves and debris in their wake, a pack of animals—impossible to identify at first, just a blur of fur—charge through the foliage directly toward them. “Get down!” Josh yanks Lilly back behind a deadfall log on the edge of the creek bed.
“What is it?” Lilly crouches down behind the worm-eaten wood.
“Dinner!” Josh raises the gun’s back sight to his eyes and aims at the oncoming deer—a small cluster of does with bushy ears pinned, and eyes as wide as billiard balls—but something stops Josh from firing. His heart throbs in his chest, his skin flushing with gooseflesh—the realization exploding in his brain.
“Josh, what’s the matter?”
The deer roar past Josh, snapping twigs and throwing stones as he sidesteps the stampede.
Josh swings the gun up at the darker shadows coming behind the animals. “Run, Lilly!”
“What?—No!” She rises up behind the log, watching the deer vault across the riverbed. “I’m not leaving you!”
“Cross the creek, I’m right behind you!” Josh aims the shotgun up at the shapes coming down the hill, weaving through the undergrowth.
Lilly sees the horde of zombies lumbering toward them, at least twenty, sideswiping trees and bumping into each other. “Oh, shit.”
“GO!”
Lilly scrambles across the gravelly trough and plunges into the shadows of the adjacent forest.
Josh backs away, aiming the front sight at the leading edge of the swarm coming toward him.
All at once, in that single instant before he fires, he sees oddly shaped bodies and garb, strange burned faces and costumes mutilated practically beyond recognition, and Josh realizes what happened to the previous owners of the lost three-ring circus tent—the unfortunate members of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus.
SIX
Josh squeezes off a shot.
The blast cracks open the sky, the pigeon grain punching a divot through the forehead of the closest midget. Twenty feet away, the little rotting corpse convulses backward, banging into three other dwarfs in bloody clown face and snarling black teeth. The little zombies—as stunted and deformed as sickly gnomes—scatter sideways.
Josh takes one last glance at the surreal intruders closing in on him.
Behind the midgets, stumbling down the embankment, comes a motley assortment of dead performers. A giant strong man with a handlebar mustache and musculature torn open in bloody gouges lumbers alongside a morbidly obese female cadaver, half nude, her fat rolls dangling over her genitals, her milky eyes buried in a face as lumpy as stale dough.
Bringing up the rear, a haphazard assortment of dead carnies, freaks, and contortionists follow stupidly. Encephalitic pinheads, their tiny mouths snapping, stumble along beside ragged trapeze artists in garish sequins and gangrenous faces, followed by multiple amputees trundling along spasmodically. The pack moves in fits and starts, as feral and hungry as a school of piranhas.
Josh lurches away, vaulting across the dry creek bed in a single leap.
He scuttles up the opposite bank and plunges into the neighboring woods with the shotgun over his shoulder. There is no time to reload another shell. He can see Lilly in the distance, sprinting toward the denser trees. He catches up with her in a matter of seconds and directs her to the east.
The two of them vanish into the shadows before what remains of the Cole Brothers’ Family Circus even has a chance to stagger across the creek.
* * *
On their way back to the gas station, Josh and Lilly run into a smaller herd of deer. Josh gets lucky and bags one of the juvenile does with a single blast. The booming report echoes up across the sky—far enough