The Walking Dead_ The Road to Woodbury - By Robert Kirkman Page 0,52
Josh asks.
“Boss laid down the law last week, no more races, too much noise. Racket was drawing biters.”
“There’s a boss here?”
The smirk on Martinez’s face curdles into something unreadable. “Don’t worry, cousin. You’ll be meeting him soon enough.”
Josh sneaks a glance at Lilly, who is busily gnawing on her fingernails. “Not sure we’re gonna be sticking around very long.”
“It’s up to you.” Martinez gives a noncommittal shrug. He slips on a pair of fingerless, leather Carnaby gloves. “Keep in mind, though, those mutual benefits I was talking about.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Our apartments are all filled up but we still got places you can stay in the center of town.”
“Good to know.”
“I’m telling you, once we get that wall expanded, you’ll have your pick of places to live.”
Josh says nothing.
Martinez stops smirking and all at once, in the dim green light, he looks as though he’s remembering better days, maybe a family, maybe something painful. “I’m talking about places with soft beds, privacy … picket fences and trees.”
A long pause of awkward silence.
“Lemme ask you something, Martinez.”
“Shoot.”
“How did you end up here?”
Martinez lets out a sigh. “God’s honest truth, I don’t really remember.”
“How’s that?”
He gives another shrug. “I was alone, ex-wife got bit, my kid up and disappeared. I guess I didn’t give a shit about much of anything anymore but killing biters. Went on kind of a rampage. Put down a whole slew of those ugly motherfuckers. Some locals found me passed out in a ditch. Took me here. Swear to God that’s about all I remember.” He cocks his head as though reconsidering. “I’m glad they did, though, especially now.”
“What do you mean?”
Martinez looks at him. “This place ain’t perfect but it’s safe, and it’s only gonna get safer. Thanks in no small part to the guy we got in charge now.”
Josh looks at him. “This is the ‘boss’ guy I assume you’re talking about?”
“That’s right.”
“And you say we’re gonna get a chance to meet this guy?”
Martinez holds up a gloved hand as if to say, Just wait. He pulls a small two-way radio from the breast pocket of his flannel shirt. He thumbs the switch and speaks into the mouthpiece. “Haynes, take us to the courthouse … they’re waiting for us over there.”
Another loaded glance passes between Josh and Lilly as the lead vehicle pulls off the main road and heads across the town square, a statue of Robert E. Lee guarding a kudzu-covered gazebo. They approach a flagstone government building on the far edge of the park, its stone steps and portico ghostly pale in the snow-veiled darkness.
* * *
The community room lies at the rear of the courthouse building, at the end of a long, narrow corridor lined with glass doors leading into private offices.
Josh and company gather in the cluttered meeting room, their boots dripping on the parquet floor. They are exhausted and in no mood to meet the Woodbury Welcome Wagon but Martinez tells them to be patient.
Snow ticks against the high windows as they wait. The room, warmed by space heaters and dimly lit with Coleman lanterns, looks as though it has seen its share of heated exchanges. The crumbling plaster walls bare the scars of violence. The floor is strewn with overturned folding chairs and littered with wadded documents. Josh notices blood streaks on the front wall, near a tattered Georgia state flag. Generators thrum in the bowels of the edifice, vibrating the floor.
They wait a little over five minutes—Josh pacing, Lilly and the others sitting on folding chairs—before the sound of heavy boots echo out in the corridor. Someone is whistling as the footsteps approach.
“Welcome, folks, welcome to Woodbury.” The voice that emanates from the doorway is low and nasally, and filled with faux conviviality.
All heads turn.
Three men stand in the doorway with smiles on their faces that don’t match their cold, lidded stares. The man in the middle radiates a weird kind of energy that makes Lilly think of peacocks and fighting fish. “We can always use more good people around here,” he says, and steps into the room.
Lean and rawboned in his ratty fisherman’s sweater, his cinder-black hair shapeless and shaggy, he sports a five o’clock shadow of whiskers on his face that he’s already trimming and styling into the beginnings of a Fu Manchu mustache. He has a strange nervous tic that is hardly noticeable—he blinks a lot.
“Name’s Philip Blake,” he says, “and this is Bruce over here, and that’s Gabe.”
The other two men—both older—follow on the younger man’s