The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,38

the garage.

Sitting up and looking around the service bay, Bob Stookey apparently heard the engine noises mere seconds after they had awakened Josh out in the office. “The hell is going on?” he mumbles. “Sounds like the Indy 500 out there.”

“Everybody up,” Josh says, storming into the garage, frantically looking around the greasy floor, searching for something.

“What’s wrong?” Lilly rubs the sleep from her eyes, her heart starting to thump. “What’s going on?”

Josh comes over to her. He kneels and speaks softly yet urgently. “Something’s going down out there, vehicles moving fast, real reckless and shit—I don’t want to get caught unawares.”

She hears the roar of engines, the pinging of gravel flying. The noises are getting closer. Lilly’s mouth goes dry with panic. “Josh, what are you looking for?”

“Get dressed, babydoll, quick.” Josh glances across the room. “Bob—you see that box of .38 caliber slugs we brought back?”

Bob Stookey torques himself up to a standing position, awkwardly pulling his work trousers over his long underwear, a slice of moonlight coming through the skylight and striping his deeplylined features. “I put it over on the workbench,” he says. “What’s the deal, captain?”

Josh hurries over and grabs the box of ammo. He reaches under his lumberjack coat, pulls the .38 snubbie from his belt, flicks open the cylinder, and loads it while he talks. “Lilly, you go get the lovebirds. Bob, I’m gonna need you to get that pigeon gun of yours and meet me out front.”

“What if they’re friendly, Josh?” Lilly pulls her sweater on, steps into her muddy boots.

“Then we got nothing to worry about.” He whirls back toward the doorway. “Get moving, both of you.” He lurches out of the room.

Heart racing, flesh prickling with terror, Lilly hurries across the garage, charges through the archway, and then down the narrow aisle of the retail store. A single hanging lantern lights her way.

“You guys! Wake up!” she says after reaching the storeroom door and pounding loudly.

Shuffling noises, bare feet on cold floorboards, then the door clicks partially ajar. Megan’s drowsy, dazed face peers out on a cloud of skunk-weed smoke. “¿Qué pasa? dude—what the fuck?”

“Get up, Megan, we got trouble.”

The girl’s face goes instantly taut and alarmed. “Walkers?”

Lilly shakes her head emphatically. “I don’t think so, unless they’ve learned how to drive cars.”

* * *

Minutes later, Lilly joins Bob and Josh out in front of Fortnoy’s—in the frigid, crystalline, predawn air—while Scott and Megan huddle behind them in the office doorway with blankets wrapped around themselves. “Oh, my God,” Lilly utters, almost to herself.

A little less than a mile away, over the crest of the neighboring trees, a vast miasma of smoke rises up and blots out the stars. The horizon behind it glows a sickly pink, and it looks as though the black ocean of pines is on fire. But Lilly knows it’s not the forest that’s burning.

“What have they done?”

“This ain’t good,” Bob murmurs, the shotgun clutched in his cold hands.

“Get back,” Josh says, thumbing the hammer back on the .38 police special.

The engine noises close in, maybe a few hundred yards away now, coming up the winding farm road—the sources of the noise still obscured behind a veil of night and the trees bordering the property—their headlights creating wildly arcing beams. Tires skid and careen through gravel. Rays of light shoot up into the sky, then across the tops of trees, then back across the road.

One of the headlights flares across the Fortnoy’s sign and Josh mutters, “What the hell is wrong with them?”

Lilly stares at the first vehicle that comes into view—a late-model sedan—swerving up the snaking gravel road, then going into a skid. “What the fuck?”

“They ain’t stoppin’! THEY AIN’T STOPPIN’!!” Bob starts backing away from the twin beams of deadly halogen light.

The car skids into the lot, roaring out of control across the fifty yards of pea gravel bordering Fortnoy’s property, the rear end raising a thunderhead of dust in the indigo predawn chill.

“LOOK OUT!”

Josh springs into action, grabbing Lilly by the sleeve and pulling her out of harm’s way, while Bob spins toward the office and screams at the top of his lungs at the two lovers huddling wide-eyed in the open doorway.

“GET OUTTA THERE!!”

Megan yanks her stoner boyfriend out of the door and across the apron of cracked cement flanking the fuel islands. The sedan—revealing itself, as it looms closer and closer, to be a battered Cadillac DeVille—screeches and fishtails toward the building. Bob lunges toward Megan. Scott lets out a garbled